http://www.miamiherald.com/news/southflorida/story/1130229.html Mystery of Miami construction site cemetery grows A long-forgotten cemetery may have been the final resting place for hundreds of black Miamians, but preliminary findings suggest the burial ground was not that large. BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI aviglucci@MiamiHerald.com The mystery surrounding a long-forgotten cemetery unearthed by construction crews two months ago has only deepened with a genealogist's discovery of records suggesting hundreds of black Miamians may have been buried there more than 75 years ago. Historian Larry Wiggins, using a database of Florida death certificates compiled by the Mormon church, has found 523 names of people -- many of them Bahamian settlers or of Bahamian parentage and many of them infants -- who may have been buried in the cemetery on the edge of the old Lemon City settlement between the 1910s and the mid-1930s. If he's right, though, where are they? Archaeologists have so far recovered the scattered remains of about 20 people from dirt piles excavated for construction of an affordable-housing tower on Northwest 71st Street just east of Interstate 95. A radar survey of the ground suggests there may be more grave sites on the property, archaeologist Bob Carr said, but it's unclear whether there might be enough to account for everyone on Wiggins' list. One possibility, Carr says, is that the cemetery -- which appears on no legal records -- was partially cleared long ago, perhaps for construction of a succession of buildings that occupied at least a portion of the property starting from at least the 1960s until last year, when a YMCA facility was demolished to make way for the residential project. But if that's true, why did no relatives protest or come forward at the time? ''It's honestly very curious to us how a cemetery and all records of it could just vanish,'' said Patrick Range, an attorney representing the developers of the residential project who inadvertently began construction of a tower on the cemetery site. PLEA TO CITY BOARD As archaeologists prepare to dig into the ground to see what lies under the surface, black historians and activists will go before the city of Miami's preservation board on Tuesday. They want the board to approve a resolution asking the developers to leave the remainder of the property undeveloped. The tower under construction takes up about half the site believed to have been occupied by the cemetery. ''We don't want any kind of building on the rest of the property,'' said preservationist Enid Pinkney. ``We would like it to be a memorial park in honor of those pioneers who were buried there.'' City preservation officer Ellen Uguccioni says the burial ground does not merit consideration for historic designation because it has no architectural features and there is no evidence that anyone of historic note was buried there. State law does permit construction on former cemeteries so long as remains are appropriately moved. Range said the developers, Carlisle Development Group and Biscayne Housing Group, are open to the idea of a memorial. Future phases of the project would only minimally impinge on what remains of the possible cemetery area. ''Certainly we want to have some type of appropriate memorial, but first we want to make sure we have a full understanding of who is buried there,'' Range said. The cemetery's existence, discovered by construction crews in late April, has flummoxed historians, who say there is no legal or historical record of it, except for a label on two commercial maps from 1925 and 1936. A search of city records after the discovery turned up no other mention of the cemetery. Nor had the developers or city planners found anything during an extensive review process in preparation for construction. Unusually, the cemetery area had never been platted until the residential tower developer had it done. Just as baffling is the fact that only a handful of people have come forward since the discovery with recollections of the cemetery. One was a 100-year-old woman in Brownsville named Tereseta DeVeaux, who said it served as the black burial ground in the area when she was a little girl. CLUE FOR SEARCH She recalled attending a funeral there for a farmer named Theophilus Clark, which gave Wiggins the clue he needed to start searching. He found the Bahamas-born Clark's name on a database indexing Florida death certificates on familysearch.org, a website maintained by the Mormon church. It listed his burial place as Lemon City Cemetery. Because historians know of no other Lemon City cemetery, the presumption is it refers to the newly discovered site -- though the inference is not conclusive. Lemon City was a mostly white farming settlement in the early 20th century that contained segregated pockets of blacks as well. Searching under Lemon City for place of burial, Wiggins came up with hundreds of other names, all described as ''black'' or ''negro.'' The death certificates include substantial information and tantalizing threads, including birthplace, occupation and names and birthplaces of parents -- and even some home addresses for the deceased. SEGREGATED Many were from Overtown, the city's original black district at a time when blacks and whites were legally segregated. Listed occupations range from laborer and housekeeper to farmer and laundress. The earliest listed burial is in 1911, and the last in 1935, suggesting the cemetery fell out of use about then.