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Tombstones to be removed from bayou PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Sunday, 10 July 2005
Tombstones to be removed from bayou

By Kelly Hawes
The Daily News

Published June 24, 2005

Discarded tombstones dating back as far as the 19th century might soon be pulled from a bayou at Galveston’s Calvary Cemetery.
“We do have crews working on that,” said Annette Gonzales Taylor, communications director for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

Taylor said Wayne Knight, facilities manager for the archdiocese, had obtained the necessary approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and had made plans to begin pulling the stones out of the water Friday. He’ll use a truck equipped with a boom, she said, to minimize damage to the stones.

“As soon as we have them out of the water, we’ll be able to begin work to determine where they belong,” Taylor said.

How will the archdiocese do that?

“Certainly, we have records,” she said. “We can check those, and in some cases, we may have to contact families.”

How the stones got into the water in the first place, she said, remains uncertain.

“We just don’t know,” she said. “We’re working on trying to find out.”

Calvin Wehrle, an amateur archaeologist, says he has found at least a half dozen stones in the bayou. He reported the find to cemetery officials, who initially expressed no interest in retrieving them.

“I think they believed that they were discarded stones that might have been in there for a perfectly good reason,” Taylor said.

Sometimes families move a grave to a larger plot, she said. Other times they replace an old stone, and in still others a stone arrives with an error. In all of those cases, Taylor said, a stone might reasonably be discarded.

Linda McBee, who has spent years studying local cemeteries, has already determined the origin of one of the stones.

A stone carrying the name of Nellie Killeen, who died in 1892 at the age of 21, lies along the shoreline of the bayou just inside the entrance to the cemetery.

McBee said records indicate that Killeen, who died of tuberculosis, was buried in Old Catholic Cemetery on Broadway.

In a news story this week, an official with the archdiocese had voiced doubt that retrieving the stones would be a wise use of resources.

On Wednesday, Taylor voiced no such reservations. She said the archdiocese wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery.

“We will take whatever steps necessary to do that and get these stones back where they belong,” she said.

The change of heart came after news stories drew attention to the stones, but Taylor said there had been no public outcry.

“We’ve had no public reaction either at the cemetery offices or at our offices in Houston,” she said.

Taylor said there had been no talk of disciplinary action.

“As I said, there could be legitimate reasons why the stones are there, and we certainly have no evidence of any wrongdoing,” she said.

http://www.galvnews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=00b7b05e761ff369
 
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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

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