Latest news with #cemetery
CTV News
18 hours ago
- General
- CTV News
‘A very awkward and bizarre situation' sees St. Marys officials cease park uses at former cemetery
An old St. Marys cemetery at East Ward Park on July 23, 2025. (Sean Irvine/CTV News London) More than 140 years after its last burial, the souls at rest in a St. Marys cemetery have come back to 'haunt' the town. The community northeast of London has been forced to idle two baseball diamonds, which sit atop the former graveyard now known as East Ward Park. David Vessie has lived next door to the park since 1952. As a child, he would play in the weeds amongst the collapsed graves. 'Oh, yeah. All these here and all down at the end of the park. They were all over the place,' said Vessie. David Vessie St. Marys resident David Vessie on July 23, 2025. (Sean Irvine/CTV News London) Today, behind a baseball diamond sits a stack of tombstones representing the lives of settlers who passed generations ago. It is one of two sections of stones on the edges of the vast park. The stones have rested here since sometime in the late 1950s or early 60s when service clubs cleaned up the overgrown cemetery and transformed it into a park. Over the following decades, most people in St. Marys have forgotten the dead still rest below. Although some remains were reinterred in the 1880s, the town recently learned some settlers remain. 'We believe that there are still quite a few bodies that are here,' stated Jenna McCartney of the Town of St. Marys. Jenna McCartney Jenna McCartney, clerk for the Town of St. Marys, on July 23, 2025. (Sean Irvine/CTV News London) The information was discovered in an act of good faith. St. Marys is attempting to assume ownership of the land from three protestant churches, two of which no longer exist. As part of the process, they contacted the Bereavement Authority of Ontario (BAO), an arms-length government agency, for insight. McCartney said that call sparked an inspection and, ultimately, a violation against the town, 'That's when it became identified that they didn't know that we were using it for active recreation currently.' Once notified of the violation, the town ceased baseball games at two diamonds on the former cemetery site. For now, a playground will remain. The BAO is expected to issue a final ruling by the end of summer. East Ward Park An old St. Marys cemetery at East Ward Park on July 23, 2025. (Sean Irvine/CTV News London) 'We're maintaining the land and trying to make it a great space for people and to be respectful in the interim,' said St. Marys Mayor Al Strathdee. 'So, it is a very awkward and bizarre situation, I would say. But hopefully going forward, we can work something out with the BAO.' Strathdee anticipates residents will be allowed to use the park for light uses, including picnics and reflection, in the future. 'We have operated it without any disrespect to anyone, and we'll have to see what the BAO says going forward,' he said. But Vessie is torn, 'It is a graveyard, and you've got to respect that. But you know, what harm are they (children) doing? They're just kids playing T-ball.'
CBC
2 days ago
- General
- CBC
Daughter finds WWII veteran's grave empty
A British woman wanted to relocate her estranged father's grave from a cemetery near Winnipeg to a military site in Ontario, but was shocked to learn the grave her father was supposed to be in was empty.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Tulare County supervisors named themselves to the Tulare Cemetery District Board
The Tulare County Board of Supervisors voted to temporarily serve as the board of trustees of the Tulare Public Cemetery District. The decision, which was made at its July 1 meeting, follows years of complaints about the management of the district, accusations of financial irregularities, and the condition of the two district cemeteries. Israel Sotelo, Jr., chief of staff for the Tulare County Board of Supervisors, outlined the board's options, before the meeting was opened to public comments. 'The health and safety code requires no other options other than the county supervisors to replace all the board members,' said Steve Presant, Tulare Cemetery Board chairman. 'If they take this option, which I hope they do, they'll actually inherit a fantastic group of employees who actually work very hard, and feel that their job is not just cutting grass and digging holes, but there is a ministry to them, to people in the Tulare community,' he added. Charlie Ramos, cemetery district vice chairman, said that he was also supportive of supervisors taking over the cemetery district. 'It's just something that needs to be done for the simple fact that we just can't get business done,' he explained. 'The rhetoric has gone to a point where the meetings are unable to happen at all.' Anna Limon also called for the cemetery board to be dismantled, but added, 'I have to disagree with Mr. Presant as far as the employees, specifically the manager, remaining there as an employee.' She complained about having to pay fees to the cemetery district that she said should not have been district fees. 'They're cheating the public, and they're not being disclosing of the contracts,' she said. Mary Sepada was critical of Presant as well as of the district manager, and called for an investigation. 'The main thing is start looking at finances,' she said. 'Where is this money going? Where is it being spent? How much of it is being spent? What account to pay? You know, Peter paying Paul, robbing from one account to another to pay the bills.' Xavier Avila, district trustee, introduced himself as one of two board members still serving on the board. 'And I'm not going to resign,' he said. 'I'm not going to stop from doing my duty.' He said, however, that he supported the supervisors becoming cemetery trustees. 'I support it because we can't lose insurance,' he said. 'Without insurance, you can't operate the cemetery. And the cemetery is a very vital function. We have to bury people.' 'The problem is a lack of accountability, a lack of transparency, the misuse of public funds, and that's the tip of the iceberg' said Alberto Aguilar, who also agreed that supervisors should temporarily run the district. 'You have to conduct an investigation,' he said. 'And if you want documentation, I'd be more than happy to provide it to you. The records are there for you to look at or to have somebody look at. 'We need to have a board that the public can trust and respect,' he added. 'You cannot trust and respect a manager who deliberately and intentionally falsifies financial records and is not held accountable.' County supervisors then discussed their options. 'I just think this is really shameful that this is going on,' said Supervisor Amy Shuklian. 'I'd be embarrassed if I was a member of this cemetery district. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's power, ego, or ignorance, but something's going on. 'I have a really, a big fear of setting a precedent by taking over the cemetery district because we've had districts in trouble before, water districts, cemetery districts, memorial districts, but we haven't had to come in and take them over,' she continued. 'I'm very hesitant to do this, but for the folks and the families who are grieving, or who may have to place a family member in the cemetery in the future, I may decide to go ahead and do this so we can get in there. 'And yes, we will go in there and make sure things are being done correctly,' she added. 'Seat a new board, obviously, maybe a board that doesn't have the power trip or the ego trip or the ignorance, to do this job.' 'It's very important for the community of Tulare, which is the only reason we are even considering this, to have a cemetery so that their loved ones and community members can be buried, and so that they can also have a place to grieve respectfully,' said Board of Supervisors Chair Pete Vander Poel. 'It's unfortunate that we are in this position, however, there are several factors that have led us to this point,' he said. 'I do know that the district has received notification that if a governance change is not made, there will no longer be any insurance for the cemetery, and that will cease operations altogether.' He added that there was no choice about what actions needed to be taken 'if we want to continue to have an operating cemetery in the community of Tulare. 'If we do take this action, it's our duty as a board to make sure that we don't set this up for failure going forward,' Vander Poel said. 'We are going to seat ourselves as trustees. We're going to conduct public meetings in a way that members of the public can come and provide their input, and can see the way that the county does business. 'I do not want this to be a forever thing where we're going to come in and we're going to be permanently the Tulare Public Cemetery District board members,' he said. 'I want this to be for a period of time to get the policies and procedures implemented, and the proper training given to the right people so that we set this up for success when a new board is seated at some point in the hopefully not-so-distant future. 'I don't like the potential of setting a precedent, but I also do know that when we are elected officials at this level, we have a duty to the public to make sure that when there is a situation like this that we do step in and make sure that something that is a public need is continued,' he added. 'I echo the sentiments of my colleagues and I think people have lost sight of who this impacts,' said Supervisor Eddie Valero. 'It's the grieving families who seek comfort and care during and after burial. I too was a bit hesitant, but I support my colleagues in the decision to make things right moving forward for this special district.' Supervisor Larry Micari moved to appoint the Tulare County Board of Supervisors as the board of trustees for the Tulare Public Cemetery District. 'However, I'd like to add that I agree with Supervisor Shuklian that we should not be in this business,' he said, before adding conditions to his motion. 'Number one is the cemetery district is to accept all liability past, present, and future – not the county,' Micari said. 'They need to retain their insurance and if there's anything that comes up, this cemetery district is the one that needs to accept the liability. 'The district is to reimburse the county also for all staff and time incurred and costs,' he said. 'Our staff is busy, we're working, we're doing everything we can. We now have additional responsibilities and the district needs to reimburse the county for time and any costs.' He added that an ad hoc committee be formed to select new cemetery board members and that Vander Poel be on that committee because the cemetery district is in his supervisorial district. 'And that no board member who has served in the last five years on the Tulare Cemetery District is to ever, and I repeat ever, be reappointed again,' Micari said. 'And I want that note put in the file for the cemetery district so 10 years down the road if their name comes up, it'll be on record they're to never be appointed again.' He added that county counsel is to become the legal counsel for the district. 'I want a 90-day update with some type of plan or update, as to what staff has discovered and find out what the real issues and concerns are so we can have a plan, start moving forward, and get this turned around,' he said. 'And it's my understanding, and I don't have a lot of details, but I was briefed at the last meeting there were people out there harassing (cemetery) staff,' he said. 'I'm not pointing any fingers, however, I want us to take the same stance we would to protect our (county) staff. If anybody out there is a harasser, I want a law enforcement called and I want us to get county counsel on board to get restraining orders against those people to keep them away from harassing staff. 'So, that is my motion,' Micari added. 'I think that's the most complex motion we've ever heard,' Vander Poel commented. Shuklian offered a very brief second to the motion, which passed unanimously with a 5-0 vote. Note to readers: If you appreciate the work we do here at the Visalia Times Delta, please consider subscribing yourself or giving the gift of a subscription to someone you know. This article originally appeared on Visalia Times-Delta: Tulare County Supervisors become Tulare Cemetery District Board
Washington Post
7 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Graves near site of Maryland reform school for Black children rediscovered
At the base of a towering tree in an overgrown Maryland forest, the gravestone of William Jones has been pushed sideways by roots and earth in the 138 years since he was buried there. Jones, a Black boy from Baltimore, was 17 in 1887 when he is believed to have died while imprisoned at what was then the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children. The facility — now called the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center — is still located across a winding road from his resting place. Another 100 mossy graves believed to belong to more Black children sit nearby, their weathered tombstones sinking into the forest floor beneath leaves and branches. For more than a century, their stories have been lost and their graves left to deteriorate, despite records that show state officials have been aware of the segregated cemetery since at least the 1970s. There is no sign marking it, no memorial acknowledging what happened here, no groundskeeper to sweep away the brush and the bramble. There are no flowers left by family, because there are no headstones, just rows and rows of unmarked cinder blocks that symbolize Maryland's long and complicated history with the incarceration of Black people. But a coalition of current and former state officials is working to change that. 'There's a direct through line to the practices of yesterday to what we can do today to rectify how we're handling children in our prison system,' Maryland state Sen. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery) said during a visit to the cemetery Thursday. 'I think this history grounds all of us in understanding what our predecessors did and our obligation as leaders today to rectify that practice.' Standing among the abandoned gravestones, Smith, the chair of the Maryland Senate's Judicial Proceedings Committee, and former Department of Juvenile Services secretary Vincent Schiraldi outlined their hopes for the grounds — and the racial reconciliation they believe should follow. Already, an application for a roadside marker is pending before the Maryland Department of Transportation to acknowledge where the state created the segregated House of Reformation in 1870. A separate application for a $250,000 state grant has been submitted to the Department of Planning to help pay for rehabilitating the cemetery site. More than that, though, Smith and Schiraldi said, they want the state to reckon with the injustices of the past through action in the present. Maryland ranks fourth in the nation in its percentage of people incarcerated for crimes they committed as children. Aside from Alabama, the state charges more children as adults per capita than any other in the nation. And in Maryland, Black children are seven times as likely to be charged as adults than their White peers, officials have said. Schiraldi, who resigned from Democratic Gov. Wes Moore's Cabinet last month amid tension over juvenile crime in the state, said it is critical that Maryland rectify the wrongs that lawmakers and political leaders enabled for decades. 'We have to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past,' Schiraldi said Thursday. 'They were doing some things in the past that were unacceptable and despicable, like segregating kids by race and treating the kids of color more poorly and burying them in a potter's field. But at least they were taking them out of the adult prisons of the day.' Smith said he will again introduce a bill during next year's legislative session to change a law that automatically sends young people accused of one of 33 offenses to the adult court system. Smith's bill would shorten that list to include only the most violent offenses, including murder and rape. Spokespeople for the department and Moore did not answer questions Thursday about whether the administration plans to back Smith's legislation, which the Department of Juvenile Services previously supported under Schiraldi. The DJS spokesperson said that the department's research is 'powerful work that is vital to telling the agency's often uncomfortable history' and that officials under acting secretary Betsy Fox Tolentino are 'evaluating steps forward for the research' into the abandoned cemetery. Moore's spokesperson, who did not address questions about the cemetery, said in a statement that the administration will continue to 'preserve the history of this state, uplift the stories of our people, ensure Marylanders are aware of the state's long and often complicated history, and work to repair generations of decisions that negatively impacted Marylanders.' The Maryland General Assembly established the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children some 20 years after lawmakers had established a similar facility — a 'House of Refuge' — for White children. State lawmakers wrote back then that Black children were being held in the state's adult penitentiary, some as young as 5 years old and 'so small as to be able to creep through the prison bars.' Established as a privately run corporation in rural Prince George's County, the reform school would eventually include a sprawling campus with a farm on which the children worked, a two-story factory, a hospital, classrooms and living quarters, according to documents from the Maryland Historical Trust. About 250 Black children and teens were admitted annually, according to state archives. Boys were sent to the reform school for 'begging, vagrancy, criminal acts, or incorrigibility,' researchers wrote in state documents. The House of Reformation was marked by years of complaints about deplorable conditions, prompting the state to take control in 1937. The facility was desegregated by order of Maryland's high court in July 1961, seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. Evidence that modern state officials were aware of the cemetery dates back to at least the 1970s, when the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission surveyed the property. A comprehensive study of the land and cemetery was conducted by the state in 2009, when historians documented the site with maps and photos. Then last year, Schiraldi and his staff began a project to research and document the history of the DJS with the hope of educating the staff on the legacy of juvenile justice in the state and promoting a sense of stewardship over the direction the agency was headed. During a tour of the facility grounds, led by a longtime department employee who had become the unofficial historian at Cheltenham, he asked officials if they had ever heard of the old cemetery. They had not, so they crossed the road and traipsed through the woods, searching for an hour between trees and through overgrowth for the gravestones before giving up. DJS staff later contacted the Maryland Historical Trust, which provided a cemetery map created during their 2009 survey of the area. Last fall, DJS officials and staff — this time accompanied by two justice-involved teens and their parents — ventured back into the woods. They found the tombstone for William Jones and the grave markers for three other boys: Anthon Jones, 11; Asbury Brown, 15; and a 16-year-old whose last name was Washington. They were overcome by the sight, said Marc Schindler, Schiraldi's former chief of staff. They gathered in a circle, and one of the teens' mothers asked if she could pray. As they left the woods that day, Schindler said, one of the teens told him the state needed to act. These children didn't deserve to be cast aside without recognition, the teen said, just because they were Black and imprisoned. That is when state officials initiated their bid for restoration grant money. Along the way, the DJS came across an online repository of death certificates for boys who died at the facility — a trove of documents that had been discovered and uploaded by a woman named Rosemary Clark. Clark, 65, who grew up in Prince George's County, had developed a hobby of cemetery and genealogy research. While sifting through death certificates in 2021, she came across one for a young boy who had died at the House of Reformation. It struck her, she said, because the child was listed as an 'inmate.' In the course of additional research, she found another death certificate from the House of Reformation, and then another. Initially, she said in an interview, she thought there had been some kind of illness outbreak at the facility. She kept digging, though, and found tales in old newspaper archives of abuse and neglect. To date, she has found more than 100 death certificates for boys who died at the House of Reformation between 1898, when Maryland first started requiring death certificates, and 1930. 'They can't be made whole,' Clark said, 'but they at least deserve some respect in death that they didn't get in life.' Barmas Benton turned off his riding lawn mower and walked into the woods Thursday, joining the search for Cheltenham's lost cemetery, which he had learned about in October. Benton, a groundskeeper for Cheltenham Veterans Cemetery, has lived in Prince George's County since childhood, once attending Sunday school at a building on the grounds of the detention facility. He had known for decades about the school there, recalling the alerts neighbors would receive about children who had escaped. 'Look at the ages over there,' Benton said, standing among the graves. 'They're all under 18, and some of them were used for child labor.' 'It was kind of like they were abusing the system to get these kids to help support the economy in this area for the farms,' he continued. 'No, slavery wasn't around anymore. This was a new form of slavery.' Smith first learned about the cemetery a few weeks ago. But Thursday was the first time he had visited. 'It's a somber discovery,' Smith said, as he read the dates on the tombstones. 'To see this and just think about how people were treated and all the lost opportunities, lost futures that we're looking at.'
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Service Corporation International Announces Schedule For Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Release and Conference Call
HOUSTON, July 17, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI) announced it expects to issue a press release with financial results for the second quarter 2025 on Wednesday, July 30, 2025. A conference call will be hosted by SCI Management on Thursday, July 31, 2025. Details of the conference call are as follows: What: Service Corporation International Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call When: Thursday, July 31, at 8:00 a.m. Central Time How: Dial-In Numbers – (888) 317-6003 or International callers at (412) 317-6061 / Code – 0839787 or listen live via the internet through our website at in the Investors section under "Webcasts and Events" Replay: (877) 344-7529, International callers at (412) 317-0088, Code – 2965589 available through August 7, 2025, and the webcast for at least 90 days through our website at in the Investors section under "Webcasts and Events" About Service Corporation International Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI), headquartered in Houston, Texas, is North America's leading provider of funeral, cemetery and cremation services, as well as final-arrangement planning in advance, serving more than 600,000 families each year. Our diversified portfolio of brands provides families and individuals a full range of choices to meet their needs, from simple cremations to full life celebrations and personalized remembrances. Our Dignity Memorial® brand is the name families turn to for professionalism, compassion, and attention to detail that is second to none. At June 30, 2025, we owned and operated 1,485 funeral service locations and 498 cemeteries (of which 310 are combination locations) in 44 states, eight Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. For more information about Service Corporation International, please visit our website at For more information about Dignity Memorial®, please visit View original content: SOURCE Service Corporation International Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
