Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Inmates in 1991 burying coffins holding babies on Hart Island. For more than a century, to be buried on Hart Island, off the coast of the Bronx, was to be essentially forgotten.
A man run over by a train and no family to claim his body. A homeless woman who froze to death on a bitterly cold winter’s night and no loved ones to find their way to her. A stillborn baby born to a woman who could not afford to pay for a burial. These are among the approximately 850,000 forlorn souls who since 1869 have been buried in the city’s potter’s field, a 101-acre cemetery just east of City Island.
Until recently, the names of the dead - when they could be identified - were simply scribbled into ledgers, which were largely inaccessible to the public.
But on Wednesday, the veil of mystery over who was buried in the cemetery was partially lifted when the Department of Corrections, which runs the cemetery, introduced a searchable database so that people can look up the names of people buried on the island.
Stretching back to 1977, there are more than 65,000 names in the registry, and the plan is to add more names as they become available.
The dead can be searched by name - first or last - age, gender and year of death. The database also provides information on the place of death.
Dora B. Schriro, the Corrections Department commissioner, said the database would be of particular use for people searching for family members who were long considered lost.
“The service is an easy-to-use, searchable database to help family and friends determine whether their loved ones are buried there,†she said. “We’re proud to make this resource available to the community today.â€
In some ways, however, the city is catching up to the work done by one determined woman - Melinda Hunt, an artist who initially was drawn to the island in an effort to learn more about the mass graves for babies born to the city’s most impoverished mothers.
And for more than two decades, Ms. Hunt has been trying to get the city to open its books and make records more easily accessible.
Through a Freedom of Information request, she acquired tens of thousands of names of those buried on the island and has been working to make her own database available online.
It was in part because of her efforts that the City Council held hearings in 2012, in which lawmakers discussed the need for the cemetery to be more accessible to the public - both in terms of record keeping and access.
Secrecy seems as much a part of Hart Island’s history as burials. During the cold war it was a secret Nike missile base, and at various times in its history the island housed a lunatic asylum for women, a prison, an institution for cholera victims and a drug-rehabilitation center.
Over the years, the cemetery has fallen under the authority of different city agencies and tracking down records has not been a simple task.
There was a fire on the island in the late 1970s that destroyed some important records, officials said, including some records from 1956 to 1960 and several years of records from the 1970s.
The database draws on log books maintained by Department of Corrections. For those searching for older records, information may be available from the health department or, for those before 1949, the Department of Records and Information Services.
