HART ISLAND---(Bronx County, NYC) in the Long Island Sound, near City Island Although Hart Island presently functions again as a "potters' field"-cemetery for NYC residents who received a "city burial," simultaneously it is homebase of a NYC prison population. The inmates maintain the cemetery and perform burials. Due to the presence of the NYC Corrections Department ince the 1970s, families were historically denied access to visit the graves of loved ones, including a large percentage of babies and children. Hart Island has worn various institutional hats and was designated as a burial site on April 20, 1869. Its hospital quarantined yellow fever victims of the 1870s, and later those with tuberculosis. It's reformatory held 2000 delinquent boys. It housed a women's lunatic asylum. Its 101 acres were utilized as a military training ground and cemetery for Civil War soldiers, as well as POW camp, and Cold War Nike missile site. Hart Island has its troubles. Specifically, its lack of consistent, viable death records. As with other city burials, Hart Island's interred include the indigent, those unclaimed at the city morgue, and some who remain unidentified. Some records were lost in a fire there, others left to decay in abandoned buildings. Thus, there is no perfect matching of interred with death records. With over 800,000 interred, the surviving records were sent to the NYC Municipal Archives at 31 Chambers Street. This dilemma motivated Melinda Hunt to begin "The Potters Field Project." (See the video of a recent NYC news report at: http://hartisland.net/ ) Thanks to her persistence and cooperation of NYC municipal agencies, she recently obtained death records through Freedom of Information requests. More recent interments are those of NYC babies and children. On the homepage, Ms. Hunt would like to hear from families of "stillborn babies, infants or children under five who died in New York City between January 1989 and March 1990." Although the NYC Department of Corrections now allows prearranged visits from families who prove a relative's burial there, often mass graves, the absence of definitive burial records makes locating a family member unreliable. While going to Hart Island is an improvement, families must be processed through the prison system to go to a gravesite. If you have a missing family member, who possibly belonged to a group living at Hart Island, this may be the place to register and search: http://hartisland.net/ Please pass this on to other genie sits of interest. PHOTOGRAPHS of HART ISLAND TODAY http://kingstonlounge.blogspot.com/2008/08/hart-island.html NYC CORRECTION DEPARTMENT http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/hart/html/hartbook2.html The HART ISLAND PROJECT http://www.hartisland.net/wwwebs/ HART ISLAND BASIC HISTORY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_Island,_New_York @BL, 6/12/3009 ************** Download the AOL Classifieds Toolbar for local deals at your fingertips. (http://toolbar.aol.com/aolclassifieds/download.html?ncid=emlcntusdown00000004)