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Daily Record
03-05-2025
- Daily Record
Sick funeral scammers target heartbroken Scots family after teen's sudden death
Lucy Grant, 17, passed away after suffering a fatal seizure on April 15. The grieving family of a schoolgirl who died suddenly from a fatal seizure have been targeted by sick funeral scammers. Lucy Grant, 17, died at her home in Johnstone on April 15. The teenager had been diagnosed with epilepsy just over a year ago and suffered debilitating fits that left her unable to attend school. Mum Lynette and step-dad Stuart first noticed the teen wasn't responding on the morning of her death. They desperately tried to perform CPR on their daughter before emergency services arrived but she could not be saved. Lynette, 44, announced her daughter's funeral would take place on May 1 and asked mourners to wear pink. Within hours loved ones were targeted by cruel thieves who set up a fake Facebook page advertising a live stream of Lucy's funeral service in exchange for cash. The scammers also targeted mourners by adding them as friends on social media. Sharing a warning about the scam, Lynette wrote: Lucy's funeral wasn't streamed and anyone who knows us knows that there's not a chance she would have been having any mass. "Can my friends who have added this page please report it and I hope no one has given them money." Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Lucy's tragic death prompted anger across Scotland after we reported how the schoolgirl lay dead on her bedroom floor for nine and a half hours as cops and ambulance staff "argued" over who should take her body to hospital. Her family said her sudden death was shocking, but that they were left "traumatised" after the police and ambulance staff warred over whose responsibility it was to remove Lucy from the property. The agencies profusely apologised to the family after the shocking scene and said an internal investigation over the handling of the case was being undertaken. A growing number of grieving families are being targeted by fraudsters using social media. Nick Britten from the National Association of Funeral Directors previously told the Record they began seeing this type of fraud increasing last year and that many Scots families had been targeted after featuring in the news. 'Friends and family of the deceased person are not only asked to provide their credit card details to supposedly have access to view the funeral, they are sometimes asked to accept a friend request from the scammers – thereby giving them access to their Facebook information and photographs. These links are fake and anyone who engages and hands over their credit or debit card details will be doing so to scammers. 'This is a despicable practice preying on bereaved people. Our advice to members of the public is to be extremely wary of any external links supposedly promoting a live-stream, fundraising or asking for donations, and instead always check with the family or the funeral director to see whether it is legitimate. If a funeral is being live streamed, a funeral director will always be able to provide the correct link. Funeral Directors do not generally charge for live streaming.'
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Funeral homes have 300,000 sets of uncollected ashes – can one man reunite them with their families?
In the small office of a funeral home in Coventry, there are two large cabinets. At a glance, they look like typical storage units designed for paperwork. I watch as a worker unlocks the grey shutter doors and slides them open. On the shelves are rows of what look like shoeboxes, a line of wide cardboard tubes, and plastic jars. Names and dates are printed on the front of each container: details of the cremated remains inside. These cabinets hold the ashes of about 80 people, but not from recent funerals; some have been stored for decades. In 1884, a man named Dr William Price attempted to cremate the body of his deceased five-month-old son, Iesu Grist, on a hillside in Llantrisant, south Wales. Cremations were controversial and legally ambiguous at the time, but the act of burying a corpse went against Price's Druidic beliefs. As a result of the ceremony he was arrested, and he later stood trial, where the judge confirmed that Price had not, in fact, acted illegally. The case marked a shift in national attitudes, and the following year the first official cremation in the UK took place at a crematorium in Woking. Now, 140 years on, it's by far the most prevalent way in which we say goodbye to the dead. According to The Cremation Society of Great Britain, there were 535,750 cremations across the country in 2023, which represents more than 80 per cent of funerals conducted. Burial space is increasingly limited in Britain, and cremations are generally cheaper, which makes them a more practical and affordable option for many (the average cost is £3,980) – but this has caused an unexpected problem. Hundreds of thousands of people who have had a relative cremated haven't returned to collect the ashes. The cremation of an adult results in between two and four kilograms of ashes, meaning that an urn needs to be two to five litres in capacity. An enormous backlog are now left in storage around the country, and funeral homes are often at a loss as to what to do with them. In 2014, the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) estimated there were 250,000 sets of unclaimed ashes in the UK. Rachel Bradburne, director of external affairs, says a more recent assessment suggests the figure has risen significantly. 'Extrapolating the data, we can probably put it at close to 300,000 now, but that's just with our members,' Bradburne says. 'We have around 80 per cent of the sector in membership, so the true number is probably a lot higher.' Unless a funeral home has been asked to hold the ashes for a specific reason, a funeral director will attempt to contact the family soon after the ceremony, so the remains can be placed in their care. These repeated calls and letters often go unanswered or ignored. 'People don't collect for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it can be a family dispute,' Bradburne says. 'That's very complicated. But it can also be illness, or when people pass away.' Some grieving family members can't face collecting the ashes because they will then need to decide what to do with the remains. In the haze of bereavement, some may simply miss calls, forget to return or incorrectly assume the funeral home is responsible for the scattering. A miscommunication between siblings can mean each thinks the other has already taken care of the sad duty. Over time, relatives' phone numbers and addresses change, making it even harder for funeral directors to track down families. Matthew Lymn Rose, 42, is the managing director of AW Lymn The Family Funeral Service, based in Nottingham. He has a youthful face and a neat quiff, looking more like a friendly hotel manager than a funeral director. When he took over in 2015, he also inherited the unclaimed ashes that were left with his parents and grandparents, who ran the 118-year-old firm before him. When he expanded the business, buying up other funeral homes, Lymn Rose discovered these parlours, too, had backlogs of ashes. 'In one company we bought, we found them in the loft,' he says. To date AW Lymn has about 700 sets in its care. The NAFD advises funeral directors to store ashes for at least five years in the hope that someone will eventually return for them. After that, directors can return ashes to the crematorium to be scattered on the grounds. This is one method of reducing the numbers in storage, but Lymn Rose is reluctant to take this approach in case a relative should show up. 'It is more important to make the right decision than to make a quick decision,' he tells me, seriously. 'Once you have done something such as scatter or bury a set of cremated remains – especially scattering them – then you can't undo it.' Inside an urn, ashes are preserved indefinitely, but once scattered they will quickly decompose. (Ashes can be scattered anywhere in the UK with the landowner's permission, or in a body of water, such as the sea or a river, so long as it has a minimal impact on the environment and wildlife.) Greg Martin, 35, is a funeral arranger at AW Lymn who became aware of the uncollected urns sitting in his local Derby office. He made it his mission to return as many as possible. 'Yes, they're ashes, but they're still a person,' says Greg, who previously taught forensic science. He tells me about an urn that had been in the care of AW Lymn since 1993. It still had an active landline number linked to it, so Greg called it repeatedly until, finally, someone answered, and he was able to successfully reunite them. Sometimes the detective work is even more protracted. He tracked down the relative who was due to collect a set of ashes but found out that they had since died too – and so had the person who had arranged their ashes. Greg persevered until he found a living relative whom he then notified about the original urn. To date he has reunited 15 sets this way. 'Each one was happy that we were picking up the trail,' Greg says. 'It was a really good, happy emotion, rather than being negative.' However, he admits it is slow and difficult work. At one time Lymn Rose accepted that most of these urns would inevitably remain unclaimed. He transformed a room of the company's Nottingham headquarters into a columbarium (a dedicated space for storing ashes) and filled it with shelving units so they could be kept there indefinitely. But his hopes were lifted when a former civil servant named Richard Martin got in touch: he had, he said, a plan for reconnecting uncollected ashes, en masse. Richard was 25 when his father died, and the family decided to scatter the ashes at his dad's favourite golf club. But the whole process was a disaster. 'We didn't know what we were doing. We did it badly,' Richard tells me over a video call from his home in Devon. 'They were all heaped in one lump.' Richard, who is now 56, spent a lot of time afterwards thinking that there must be others out there who were just as baffled by ash etiquette as he had been. He had worked for councils across England, specialising in waste management, and then subsequently for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He had an instinct for helping the community, and the subject of scatterings stuck with him for years. 'The idea kept going around in my mind that the public has got to be better served,' Richard says. In 2010, alongside his job, Richard started what began as a blog, called Scattering Ashes, where he shared information and best practice about cremations. Then in 2015, two decades after losing his father, he realised that there was nothing to mark his final resting place, and presumed this was likely to be the case for others who had scattered ashes around the UK, too. During the Covid pandemic, in 2020, he set up the Ashes Register, an online resource where families could add a digital record of these locations, so future generations would know exactly where to pay their respects. When thinking about the long-standing issue of unclaimed ashes, Richard later had the brainwave to add a section where funeral homes could log their uncollected urns as well. His goal was to create a publicly accessible database where anyone in search of somebody's remains might find them again. 'Wouldn't it be brilliant if we could record the last resting place of everyone?' Richard says. 'It's an issue of dignity and respect. Ashes on a shelf in a cupboard does not give either.' The register has a search function where visitors can input a name, and if it is in the database, it will show precisely where that person's ashes are kept in the UK on a map. If they are kept in storage at a funeral home, the site will bring up the details of the funeral director, so steps can be made to collect them. In order for this to work, Richard needed to find funeral homes that would be willing to add their data. He applauds AW Lymn for being the first firm to get involved. So far it has added to the register 136 of its oldest sets of unclaimed ashes. These are remains that have been in storage from the years between 1952 and 2000. 'That put a little bit of a shockwave in the industry,' Richard says. He believes some funeral directors are worried about publicly adding their own lists of unclaimed ashes in case they are accused of being at fault for not returning them. 'Everybody's really nervous about this.' But slowly, more funeral directors are coming around to the idea. Richard has four on board so far, who have added a total of about 4,000 sets of ashes. He says there are already thousands of people searching the register each month. They haven't turned up a match yet, but Richard is hopeful; he is in talks with 40 funeral homes that are considering adding their lists as well. In January, Heart of England Co-op Funerals, based across the Midlands, added 756 sets of unclaimed ashes to the register. Matthew George, 47, is its head of client services; he has offered to show me around some of its branches so I can see the scale of the issue in person. When I arrive he picks me up in an electric car. He is wearing a light blue suit and has a neatly trimmed beard. Just like Lymn Rose, he is a modern vision of a funeral worker: friendly and enthusiastic, working to resolve generational issues. George first takes me to see the large cabinets in Heart of England Co-op's Coventry office. Among the urns there is a heavy marble box, which is the oldest in their possession. It holds the ashes of a man named Alexander Anderson who was born in 1868; his ashes have been sitting in storage since he died in 1956. As we leave this branch, we walk through a group of funeral directors who are gathered in the staff kitchen, taking a quick break before their next service. The Heart of England Co-op hosts about 2,300 funerals a year, 90 per cent of which are cremations, which means, just like other funeral homes, it is constantly accruing sets of ashes, although it has a more efficient electronic system for tracking and returning modern urns quickly. George takes me to another of his firm's local funeral homes, eight miles away in Nuneaton, where there are 122 sets of unclaimed ashes stored in more locked cabinets. Among them are two generations of one family: a father, a mother and their son, filed next to one another. As the next of kin is in storage alongside them, there's a chance that the family will never be collected unless another relative thinks to search for their whereabouts. 'That's the benefit of having the register,' George says. 'It makes these people visible to anybody who wants to look for them.' He tells me this is the first time something like the Ashes Register has been tried, and he is hopeful about its potential. 'It's a really good thing that people can get that visibility and go on there and go, 'Where's my loved one?'' George says. 'The more people who do that, the more people who will be found and reunited. If we can connect one person back, I think it's a success.' I ask Richard Martin what he thinks the Ashes Register will look like in five years, and how many unclaimed ashes it could potentially reconnect with loved ones if everything goes to plan. 'It depends how many funeral directors sign up and put their lists on there,' he says. 'Let's say they all do. And, if we are able to communicate to the public effectively that they could be reunited with a family member, then 10 per cent would not be unreasonable, which equates to 30,000 families.' It would be nearly impossible to reconnect every set of ashes, but Richard hopes the database will at the very least organise the details of unclaimed remains in one central place. Then they can decide what to do with those who have little chance of finding their families. 'Once we have got a proper handle on what, where and how many, we can then move forward to laying to rest all those left behind and documenting it, so that everyone, reunited or not, gets the respect they should be accorded.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
06-04-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Funeral homes have 300,000 sets of uncollected ashes – can one man reunite them with their families?
In the small office of a funeral home in Coventry, there are two large cabinets. At a glance, they look like typical storage units designed for paperwork. I watch as a worker unlocks the grey shutter doors and slides them open. On the shelves are rows of what look like shoeboxes, a line of wide cardboard tubes, and plastic jars. Names and dates are printed on the front of each container: details of the cremated remains inside. These cabinets hold the ashes of about 80 people, but not from recent funerals; some have been stored for decades. In 1884, a man named Dr William Price attempted to cremate the body of his deceased five-month-old son, Iesu Grist, on a hillside in Llantrisant, south Wales. Cremations were controversial and legally ambiguous at the time, but the act of burying a corpse went against Price's Druidic beliefs. As a result of the ceremony he was arrested, and he later stood trial, where the judge confirmed that Price had not, in fact, acted illegally. The case marked a shift in national attitudes, and the following year the first official cremation in the UK took place at a crematorium in Woking. Now, 140 years on, it's by far the most prevalent way in which we say goodbye to the dead. According to The Cremation Society of Great Britain, there were 535,750 cremations across the country in 2023, which represents more than 80 per cent of funerals conducted. Burial space is increasingly limited in Britain, and cremations are generally cheaper, which makes them a more practical and affordable option for many (the average cost is £3,980) – but this has caused an unexpected problem. Hundreds of thousands of people who have had a relative cremated haven't returned to collect the ashes. The cremation of an adult results in between two and four kilograms of ashes, meaning that an urn needs to be two to five litres in capacity. An enormous backlog are now left in storage around the country, and funeral homes are often at a loss as to what to do with them. In 2014, the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) estimated there were 250,000 sets of unclaimed ashes in the UK. Rachel Bradburne, director of external affairs, says a more recent assessment suggests the figure has risen significantly. 'Extrapolating the data, we can probably put it at close to 300,000 now, but that's just with our members,' Bradburne says. 'We have around 80 per cent of the sector in membership, so the true number is probably a lot higher.' Unless a funeral home has been asked to hold the ashes for a specific reason, a funeral director will attempt to contact the family soon after the ceremony, so the remains can be placed in their care. These repeated calls and letters often go unanswered or ignored. 'People don't collect for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it can be a family dispute,' Bradburne says. 'That's very complicated. But it can also be illness, or when people pass away.' Some grieving family members can't face collecting the ashes because they will then need to decide what to do with the remains. In the haze of bereavement, some may simply miss calls, forget to return or incorrectly assume the funeral home is responsible for the scattering. A miscommunication between siblings can mean each thinks the other has already taken care of the sad duty. Over time, relatives' phone numbers and addresses change, making it even harder for funeral directors to track down families. Matthew Lymn Rose, 42, is the managing director of AW Lymn The Family Funeral Service, based in Nottingham. He has a youthful face and a neat quiff, looking more like a friendly hotel manager than a funeral director. When he took over in 2015, he also inherited the unclaimed ashes that were left with his parents and grandparents, who ran the 118-year-old firm before him. When he expanded the business, buying up other funeral homes, Lymn Rose discovered these parlours, too, had backlogs of ashes. 'In one company we bought, we found them in the loft,' he says. To date AW Lymn has about 700 sets in its care. The NAFD advises funeral directors to store ashes for at least five years in the hope that someone will eventually return for them. After that, directors can return ashes to the crematorium to be scattered on the grounds. This is one method of reducing the numbers in storage, but Lymn Rose is reluctant to take this approach in case a relative should show up. 'It is more important to make the right decision than to make a quick decision,' he tells me, seriously. 'Once you have done something such as scatter or bury a set of cremated remains – especially scattering them – then you can't undo it.' Inside an urn, ashes are preserved indefinitely, but once scattered they will quickly decompose. (Ashes can be scattered anywhere in the UK with the landowner's permission, or in a body of water, such as the sea or a river, so long as it has a minimal impact on the environment and wildlife.) Greg Martin, 35, is a funeral arranger at AW Lymn who became aware of the uncollected urns sitting in his local Derby office. He made it his mission to return as many as possible. 'Yes, they're ashes, but they're still a person,' says Greg, who previously taught forensic science. He tells me about an urn that had been in the care of AW Lymn since 1993. It still had an active landline number linked to it, so Greg called it repeatedly until, finally, someone answered, and he was able to successfully reunite them. Sometimes the detective work is even more protracted. He tracked down the relative who was due to collect a set of ashes but found out that they had since died too – and so had the person who had arranged their ashes. Greg persevered until he found a living relative whom he then notified about the original urn. To date he has reunited 15 sets this way. 'Each one was happy that we were picking up the trail,' Greg says. 'It was a really good, happy emotion, rather than being negative.' However, he admits it is slow and difficult work. At one time Lymn Rose accepted that most of these urns would inevitably remain unclaimed. He transformed a room of the company's Nottingham headquarters into a columbarium (a dedicated space for storing ashes) and filled it with shelving units so they could be kept there indefinitely. But his hopes were lifted when a former civil servant named Richard Martin got in touch: he had, he said, a plan for reconnecting uncollected ashes, en masse. Richard was 25 when his father died, and the family decided to scatter the ashes at his dad's favourite golf club. But the whole process was a disaster. 'We didn't know what we were doing. We did it badly,' Richard tells me over a video call from his home in Devon. 'They were all heaped in one lump.' Richard, who is now 56, spent a lot of time afterwards thinking that there must be others out there who were just as baffled by ash etiquette as he had been. He had worked for councils across England, specialising in waste management, and then subsequently for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He had an instinct for helping the community, and the subject of scatterings stuck with him for years. 'The idea kept going around in my mind that the public has got to be better served,' Richard says. In 2010, alongside his job, Richard started what began as a blog, called Scattering Ashes, where he shared information and best practice about cremations. Then in 2015, two decades after losing his father, he realised that there was nothing to mark his final resting place, and presumed this was likely to be the case for others who had scattered ashes around the UK, too. During the Covid pandemic, in 2020, he set up the Ashes Register, an online resource where families could add a digital record of these locations, so future generations would know exactly where to pay their respects. When thinking about the long-standing issue of unclaimed ashes, Richard later had the brainwave to add a section where funeral homes could log their uncollected urns as well. His goal was to create a publicly accessible database where anyone in search of somebody's remains might find them again. 'Wouldn't it be brilliant if we could record the last resting place of everyone?' Richard says. 'It's an issue of dignity and respect. Ashes on a shelf in a cupboard does not give either.' The register has a search function where visitors can input a name, and if it is in the database, it will show precisely where that person's ashes are kept in the UK on a map. If they are kept in storage at a funeral home, the site will bring up the details of the funeral director, so steps can be made to collect them. In order for this to work, Richard needed to find funeral homes that would be willing to add their data. He applauds AW Lymn for being the first firm to get involved. So far it has added to the register 136 of its oldest sets of unclaimed ashes. These are remains that have been in storage from the years between 1952 and 2000. 'That put a little bit of a shockwave in the industry,' Richard says. He believes some funeral directors are worried about publicly adding their own lists of unclaimed ashes in case they are accused of being at fault for not returning them. 'Everybody's really nervous about this.' But slowly, more funeral directors are coming around to the idea. Richard has four on board so far, who have added a total of about 4,000 sets of ashes. He says there are already thousands of people searching the register each month. They haven't turned up a match yet, but Richard is hopeful; he is in talks with 40 funeral homes that are considering adding their lists as well. In January, Heart of England Co-op Funerals, based across the Midlands, added 756 sets of unclaimed ashes to the register. Matthew George, 47, is its head of client services; he has offered to show me around some of its branches so I can see the scale of the issue in person. When I arrive he picks me up in an electric car. He is wearing a light blue suit and has a neatly trimmed beard. Just like Lymn Rose, he is a modern vision of a funeral worker: friendly and enthusiastic, working to resolve generational issues. George first takes me to see the large cabinets in Heart of England Co-op's Coventry office. Among the urns there is a heavy marble box, which is the oldest in their possession. It holds the ashes of a man named Alexander Anderson who was born in 1868; his ashes have been sitting in storage since he died in 1956. As we leave this branch, we walk through a group of funeral directors who are gathered in the staff kitchen, taking a quick break before their next service. The Heart of England Co-op hosts about 2,300 funerals a year, 90 per cent of which are cremations, which means, just like other funeral homes, it is constantly accruing sets of ashes, although it has a more efficient electronic system for tracking and returning modern urns quickly. George takes me to another of his firm's local funeral homes, eight miles away in Nuneaton, where there are 122 sets of unclaimed ashes stored in more locked cabinets. Among them are two generations of one family: a father, a mother and their son, filed next to one another. As the next of kin is in storage alongside them, there's a chance that the family will never be collected unless another relative thinks to search for their whereabouts. 'That's the benefit of having the register,' George says. 'It makes these people visible to anybody who wants to look for them.' He tells me this is the first time something like the Ashes Register has been tried, and he is hopeful about its potential. 'It's a really good thing that people can get that visibility and go on there and go, 'Where's my loved one?'' George says. 'The more people who do that, the more people who will be found and reunited. If we can connect one person back, I think it's a success.' I ask Richard Martin what he thinks the Ashes Register will look like in five years, and how many unclaimed ashes it could potentially reconnect with loved ones if everything goes to plan. 'It depends how many funeral directors sign up and put their lists on there,' he says. 'Let's say they all do. And, if we are able to communicate to the public effectively that they could be reunited with a family member, then 10 per cent would not be unreasonable, which equates to 30,000 families.' It would be nearly impossible to reconnect every set of ashes, but Richard hopes the database will at the very least organise the details of unclaimed remains in one central place. Then they can decide what to do with those who have little chance of finding their families. 'Once we have got a proper handle on what, where and how many, we can then move forward to laying to rest all those left behind and documenting it, so that everyone, reunited or not, gets the respect they should be accorded.'
BBC News
28-01-2025
- General
- BBC News
Ashes of 300,000 people remain unclaimed, undertakers say
The ashes of up to 300,000 people remain unclaimed at funeral parlours across the UK, according to an industry National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) came up with the estimate in response to a consultation by the Law Commission, which is seeking to make broad reforms to the law of burial and cremation in England and Uden, who runs of W. Uden and Sons, said his funeral parlours across south London hold the unclaimed ashes of about 200 people - some dating back to the Law Commission proposes that if a funeral director has not heard from the next of kin for four weeks they should have the right to return the ashes to the crematorium. It said that such legislation should be retrospective to apply to all the ashes the funeral directors have accumulated over the Bradburne, the director of external affairs for the NAFD, said: "There needs to be something put in place going forward so the backlog doesn't build up and the Law Commission's suggestion seems very sensible. "There also then needs to be an additional solution, which is how to address this additional legacy, the legacy ashes if you like."She said solutions could include "mass scatterings" or events to properly handle their dispersal. One of the oldest ashes held at Mr Uden's funeral parlour are those of 68-year-old Elsie Elanor Agnes Emler, who died on 15 April 1965 at Farnborough Hospital in Kent. Apart from the Certificate of Cremation, there are no records of her or any recorded contact with her asked why so many ashes remain uncollected Mr Uden said: "I think the main reason is families don't know what to do with them. "I think they don't have a definite plan, a definite route of what they wish to do with their loved one's cremated remains. "They almost put it in the back of their mind and want to forget about it. And as years pass they feel, well we might as well just leave them with the funeral directors."
