On 10/7/2012 2:47 PM, susi c pentico wrote: > Yup Life happens and lots of times it is not the so called NORMAL STUFF. They could be waiting for kin, for a thaw, doesn't matter it happened. > Susi > > A great-granduncle of mine, grandfather of a cousin of mine in Indiana, beats all. He died in 1949. His remains were cremated but never claimed. They remained in the basement of the funeral home, which was bought by another funeral home company, until my cousin investigated and found them -- in 2004! So his grandfather, my great-granduncle, died in 1949 and was buried in 2004. Karen Packard Rhodes currently residing in Pinellas Park, Pinellas County, Florida

On Oct 7, 2012, at 12:48 PM, Karen Rhodes wrote: > A great-granduncle of mine, grandfather of a cousin of mine in Indiana, > beats all. He died in 1949. His remains were cremated but never > claimed. They remained in the basement of the funeral home, which was > bought by another funeral home company, until my cousin investigated and > found them -- in 2004! So his grandfather, my great-granduncle, died in > 1949 and was buried in 2004. Almost the exact thing happened with my paternal grandparents. They died in 1956 and 1958 respectively in Southern California. I had their death certificates and autopsy reports, which indicated that the remains were cremated. No interment place was mentioned and my father never talked about a burial. Because my dad and mom arranged to be cremated with ashes scattered, I assumed this had been the case with my grandparents too. Flash forward to a month ago. I Googled my grandfather's name (Alva Elwood MacLaughlan) in any possible permutation, hoping to find some clue where he might have been in the 1940 census, and up popped a record from the Santa Barbara Cemetery in Santa Barbara, California, in a transcription provided by the Santa Barbara Genealogical Society. Alva and his wife Marie had been interred there in 1991. I called the cemetery and they looked up the interment record. My aunt, Alva's and Marie's daughter, had arranged and paid for the niches using a pseudonym. A new burial permit was issued for September 1991, there was no service, and no one was present. Needless to say, none of the family was told that this happened. My aunt has since withdrawn from the family and refuses to be contacted, even by her own children, so I'll likely never find out the reason for the delayed burial. I asked the cemetery officer whether there was any paperwork indicating a previous burial or interment and he said there was nothing. He did mention that it's more common than most people realize that family members would hold onto ashes for years or even decades before deciding what to do with them. It does give me pause. Perhaps every time I visited my aunt as a youngster, my grandparents were in the garage or attic or somewhere, a lot closer than I ever realized. Best regards, Debra MacLaughlan Dumes http://sakionline.net/familypage/