I just ran across something that I found totally shocking. I was aware that Milledgeville Hosp (Baldwin Co, GA) was the "mental" hospital in GA from things that I had seen before. I was really curious about where it was located so started doing a little looking and found this site about the history of the hospital. It was the state hosp I guess for just about anything at one time. In reading through a lot of this, old age, epileptic, TB, syphilis, mentally retarded, etc were housed there. Not all of these people were disabled -- some were people that no one wanted to be bothered with and just stuck there. There are up to 30 THOUSAND graves in the cemeteries there that were only marked by numbers and with no real record system to even begin to know who was buried in all these graves. The hosp started in 1842. It was the 14th such hosp in the nation and became known as "the world's largest insane asylum." In the late 1950's early 1960's it housed up to 15 thousand people and covered 3000 acres. Most people that went there never returned home. Most people were buried before families were even notified that they had died because of the time issue back then and says very few were ever removed and placed elsewhere. Apparently most of these people were just stuck there and forgotten about. Guess this could probably explain a lot of people who just suddenly disappeared with no record trail except for maybe a court commitment -- not sure how early those started. To compound the problem of identifying the graves at Milledgeville, in the 1960-70's part of the markers were removed and others were pushed into the ground so that it was easier to mow the grounds of the hosp. There are actually 6 cemeteries there as they were divided by men, women & children and then by race. This apparently is not an isolated case, but the norm of these early institutions. The graves in such institutions were marked only with a burial number to hide the identity of the patient and shelter the relatives from the shame of having a mental patient on the family tree. Most of the records were lost or destroyed over the years and there is no way to identify who was buried where in most cases. If there are records for such places, it takes a court order just to see most of them because of the laws involved. As one article in this states -- pet cemeteries are shown more respect than most of these hosp cemeteries that are overgrown, neglected, destroyed and have little or no records. Milledgeville is now known as Central State Hosp --- _http://www2.state.ga.us/departments/dhr/cemetery4.html_ (http://www2.state.ga.us/departments/dhr/cemetery4.html) This site tells about the hospital's history in Millegeville as well as others like it and was found on the Baldwin Co, GA website. _http://www.centralstatehospital.org/genealogy.htm_ (http://www.centralstatehospital.org/genealogy.htm) This site is the for the Central State Hosp with contact info for finding out about patients and burials on the grounds there. Admissions must be 75 years or older to obtain info without court action. Burial info for 1880 to present is available although locations of the graves are probably not always known. Sharon S