Is there a category for Buried_in_a_Mass_Grave?

Question

Is there a category for persons buried in a mass grave?  My ancestor is buried in mass grave for confederate prisoners of war.  It occupies one corner of a cemetery in Chicago.

Comments

Not so sure, Scott.

England has a number of instances where people were mass buried over the centuries.  Military, lepers, diseases, plague.

I manage the profile of a guy who was buried in one mass grave, then dug up an reburied in another mass grave (because nobody knew which was which of the five buried together).

---

True. Most of the bodies brought back from Jonestown were buried in a mass grave in California. The bodies were in a state when transported that most could not be identified. Many had not immediate family or those who could afford the transportation and services/burial. So they are marked with a general marker.

The 1705 Deerfield families who were killed in an "Indian" massacre are also (probably) in a mass grave or were killed along the march to Canada. They are marked with a mass/grave type of marker.

 There should be a designation of those people as well on this and other genealogical sites.

Thanks for noting and bringing this to our attention.

---

Unique means one-of-a-kind. 

I'm of the opinion nothing much would be served by having such a category.  How would we learn anything grouping together those buried in mass graves in England's mediaeval era, with the US Civil War dead, those who were killed in the Second World War and buried in mass graves, those who were buried in mass graves across Europe in earlier (plague) times, those who were war dead and buried under lime, war dead from Australia, and so on?

The only thing to tie them together is "mass burial", which tells nobody anything. 

Far better to use the cemetery category/ies and tell the story on the profile.

---

It's hardly unique.

Mass grave with over 2,000 Confederate POWs at Finn's Point National Cemetery. including my great-great-grandfather, who was captured on July 3 at Gettysburg and died at Finn's Point in August 1864.

---

Peggy, I'm assuming that you talking about the notorious Camp Douglas cemetery, Oak Woods. If so, those cemetery records are a mess and the monument there surely does not have the names of all of those buried there.

I have several relatives who died at Camp Douglas and are buried at Oak Woods. I just use the Oak Woods category for that.

BTW: For one organisation, the Confederate monument at Oak Woods is on their top ten list to be destroyed.

---

Mass Graves are still being used here in Canada, my Sister is in one...

Answer 1

Its not unusual for there to be mass burials in Military Cemeteries, there are at least two, although smaller, mass graves in the National Cemetery near where I live.  One the result of a skirmish with Indians and the other a Word War II plane crash.  

I've never encountered a separate category for burial in a mass grave.  I just made a free space page for the one I've been actively working on: 

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Grattan_Massacre

then just categorized it under the cemetery in which its located. 

Comments

Selecting as Best Answer since this adequately describes the Cemetery Categorization that should be used.

Answer 2

I realize this is not addressing the categorization question, but ...there were many mass burials all over Europe, unfortunately, during the Holocaust.  There are many instances of the Nazis occupying towns, one by one, as they took control of countries.  Their standard process was to gather all Jews in one place, march the able bodied men out of town to the nearest forest, have them dig a huge ditch, then force them into it and shoot them all.  The next day they would bring the rest of the Jewish population there, have them climb in on top of the men and shoot them.  They did this in several different countries they occupied, but perhaps most notable is Lithuania, where in a period of two months they eliminated 93% of the Jewish population of the country, systematically, in about 150-200 different towns as they advanced.

Answer 3

Just for what it's worth, the mass grave phenomenon isn't all that rare, and it's still being done right now right here in the U.S.A.  A while back I posted a summary of a newspaper article that was reporting a major problem in a county coroner's office, where they were accumulating so many unclaimed bodies that they didn't have the resources to process them or store them.  Some were cases where the identity was unknown, but many were just deceased people for whom no relatives would claim the remains -- either because they couldn't afford to bury the person, or didn't want to be bothered, or just didn't like the guy.  Every once in a while the coroner would just cremate all those deceased and unceremoniously dispose of the remains in a mass grave.  The reporter who wrote the article had just witnessed about 600 bags of remains being placed in one large grave site.

To address the question directly though, I'm kind of inclined to agree with Melanie that there wouldn't be much genealogical significance to having a category for this.

Comments

I am looking for ancestors that seem to have been buried in a mass grave some where close to Lawton, Oklahoma. Does anyone know of mass graves in that area? Somewhere during the timeframe Indians were moved to Oklahoma. Thanks in advance.

---

Debra, you might want to post this as either a separate answer to this thread or as its own independent G2G question.  This is a pretty old thread, and nobody but me is likely to see your post if it's buried as a comment under my old answer.  And I don't know of mass graves in Oklahoma!