HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Connecticut's cemeteries continue to suffer from neglect
and lack of rule enforcement, according to advocates, families and officials.
``Many of Connecticut's oldest and most historic cemeteries are suffering from
severe neglect and are in critical, sometimes desperate, need of care and
restoration,'' state Historian Walter W. Woodward told the Hartford Courant on
Sunday.
A fund for neglected cemeteries was created in 2014 by the state legislature
and has been paying towns between $2,000 and $3,300 each year to mow grass and
repair gravestones and other features like fencing. The money for the fund comes
from death certificate fees and has been fully spent each year, Office of Policy
and Management spokesperson Chris McClure told the newspaper.
A former board member of the Connecticut Cemetery Association and current
volunteer trustee for two cemeteries in Brookfield, Jeff Nolan, wants a state
commission to oversee cemeteries and to regionalize and professionalize their
management.
He suggested using geographic information system mapping to attach the precise
location of graves to a person's vital records. He also said record keeping is
shoddy at many of the cemetery associations that run the state's 5,000
graveyards. Families of the dead often pay cemeteries to keep up the grounds and
millions of dollars of those funds are essentially unaccounted for, he said.
One such relative, retired lawyer Cheryl Jansen, wondered in 2018 where the
money she was paying to Park Cemetery in Bridgeport was going. Her questions
eventually resulted in the discovery that some 130 graves had been improperly
disturbed at the cemetery _ which includes graves from Civil War soldiers _ and
the arrest of the caretaker.
In Connecticut, the state public health department must approve new cemeteries,
but no state agency is specifically charged with cemetery oversight.
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