The Hart Island Project

The New York Times did a great, lengthy piece on Hart Island a few years ago, which references this project.

> Citing security, the city’s Correction Department also repeatedly rebuffed The Times’s requests to witness Hart Island burials firsthand. Finally, in March, The Times used a drone to fly around the island’s shoreline and record burials on video.

> For a decade, a small band of activists, led by a visual artist, Melinda Hunt, sought access to the island’s handwritten burial ledgers. More than a year ago, Ms. Hunt turned hard-won facts and old images into a website for the nonprofit organization she founded, the Hart Island Project, and shared the underlying data with The Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-...

Every human has a history, a universe of itself, of utmost importance to close friends and relatives. Which fades as time goes by. Maybe it is all stored in the fabric of matter and time and can be retrieved by some future technology. Which can be a solacing thought for those that have friends and relatives buried in anonymous graves, but until such time; this is a heartening project.

Something for other graveyards to pick up? Even those named tombstones say little about those buried there.

I was amazed that there's over 1/2 a million people buried there. It makes sense considering the size of NYC and how long it's been around, but still.

So mass graves have always been used there, nothing special to corona times. (Of course the number could raise, that's another story.)

I like the idea of an annotated life :)