United in death on Key West:
Graves shared

By MIKE CAPUZZO
Herald Staff Writer

KEY WEST - A death in the family came like an eviction notice for Tom Builard's bones.
His tombstone was destroyed, and a distant cousin was laid in his grave.  Bullard had occupied a space in the
Key West cemetery for almost half a century.
At last count, it was the 28th body placed in seven spaces in the tiny family plot, said Troy Shuler Jr., the family's historian.
"I think there are a couple of more we don't know about," said Shuler, 59, who married Tom Bullard's granddaughter.  "I have a son buried there; the grave he's in has about seven people buried in [it].”
For generations of Conch families, this has been the way of all flesh.  For at least 60 years, Key Westers have recycled graves in their historic cemetery in the heart of the island the Spanish called Cayo Hueso, Isle of Bones.
It is a burial custom unheard of elsewhere in the United States.
Gravediggers shovel up skulls, ribs - whatever's left - bury the old bones deeper and lay the new coffin on top.
The custom was born from lack of space, not from lack of love.
 Key Westers say it reunites husbands and wives, fathers and sons.  Many spouses request it even if there Is room for separate burials.
Cemetery experts call the custom desecration of the dead.
"It Is unheard of," said Eric Marmorek of Boston, a director of the 2,500-member American Cemetery Association.
"One doesn't disturb remains at all," he said.  "In many, many parts of the world where land is scarce, they use double, in some European countries, triple interments but with separate cement containers for each casket,
"What vou have here is desecration of graves.  It's a flagrant violation of anything I know of, ethically, legally, emotionally 'Cursed be he who disturbs my bones' - that's on Shakespeare's grave."
The custom has resulted in disinterment of human bones and destruction of monuments at the city owned cemetery - possible violations of state law.
Historic and veterans’ gravesites have been desecrated.  Old bones have been tossed onto piles of dirt destined for the city dump,
The cemetery is plagued by weed-choked plots, headstones marred by vandalism and voodoo and crypts that have cracked open.  After an inspection last week, Homer Rhode, Monroe County's environmental health director, ordered the city to seal off the cemetery’s hand-operated wells which he said may be contaminated.

Truth buried too

Historically, record keeping at the cemetery has been so poor that no one knows exactly how many persons are buried in the cemetery.
Estimates are as high as 100,000 persons buried in 15,000 spaces in the high ground at the foot of Solares Hill.  The truth is in terra, the earth.
More than 9,300 burials were recorded from 1889 to 1905, for instance, but no grave location marked beside more than 9,100 names.
It is, in a sense, a lost generation.
 Unrecorded are the exact gravesites of Braddish (Hog) Johnson, king of the wreckers, and Dr. Daniel W. Whitehurst, who nursed Dr. Samuel Mudd in the Dry Tortugas after Mudd nursed John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.
 Cemetery Sexton Jack Carbonell who is retiring next week after 14 years, called accusations of desecration “fictional” . . . a bunch of baloney.”
 Key Westers have practice the

Key West rite:  Desecration,
Law breaking or act of love?

custom of burying atop kin "since before I was born," Says Carbonell. who is 63.
"If the body was buried from 1910 to 1930, there's nothing left except maybe a small bone." said a cemetery worker. "If it was buried in the '5Os or '60s, you might find a skull or a leg bone."
"You get used to it," said a gravedigger.
Last week, cemetery workers destroyed a cement slab and dug up the previous interment to make room for 84-year-old Ed Burrows, who went to the grave with trumpets sounding in the New Orleans like funeral march of Key West blacks.
A metal coffin handle, pieces of a wood casket and a small human bone were shoveled onto a pile of dirt bound for the dump.

'We should be ashamed?'

By custom, Burrows' next of kin approved the reuse of the grave, Carbonell said.  Neither Carbonell nor undertaker Francisco Johnson could name the relative.
Carbonell and other Key Westers bristle when outsiders assail the Conch custom.  In letter to a local newspaper, a Miami woman called the custom shameful.
"We should be ashamed?" the sexton cried out, his face red with anger.  "Is she God, to say that we can't grant a person's last wish on earth!
"I'm not so ashamed that my mother's buried on top of my grandmother out there," he said.  "My wife and I are going on top of each other.  If we're together in life, can't we be together in death?"
Robert Maxwell, attorney, for the Florida Cemetery Association, says the custom may violate a Florida statute prohibiting disinterments without a permit.
"They'd have to remove a body, from a grave," Maxwell said.  "That's the definition of disinterment I don't know of any cemeteries that operate in that fashion.  The general philosophy is once a body, is buried, it should remain where it is."
The custom of reusing graves, which many.  Key-West residents defend with pride, outrages others.
A competing sexton who urged state regulation of the graveyard sent photographs to the Legislature of green slime (body fluid) sloshing from one crypt to another," said an aide to state Sen. Dick Anderson.  When the regular legislative session ended Friday, the bill died for the second year in a row.
One Key West resident, Nathan Roberts, found his aunt's bones strewn on the ground outside the family, vault after he buried his wife.  Workers had forgotten to replace the bones when they resealed the vault.  Carbonell said.
"So many apparently have been disintered without much respect, just sort of dumped on the side of the lot," said Monroe County librarian and historian Betty Bruce.  "Somebody, just digs somebody's grave space that doesn't belong to them after the family has moved away.
"That's all right, as long as the family approves," says Bruce.  "But I know they haven't been able to find a lot of owners of lots.
"One woman swore her ancestor's bones had been thrown in the corner of the cemetery.  I thought she was going to have a heart attack." Bruce said.
Shuler says he doesn't know who approved reusing his wife's grandfather's grave.
"Most of us were pretty upset about it," Shuler said, "but nothing was done.  I've had some kinfolk that's worked down there and moved some of the bones of their own kinfolk.  It was rather shocking to me, that scraping all the bones into one corner.  It doesn't seem right,"
The graveyard was founded after an 1846 hurricane blew bodies out of a shoreline cemetery.  Stacked skulls from Indian wars prompted Spanish explorers to name Cavo Hueso, legend has it.  To Shuler the story hits home.
"It was down there one day some years ago, and one of my nephews picked up a bone in the right-hand corner of the plot.  I made him put it down.  He wanted to know why.  I said.  'That's one of your relatives' bones. ' It was coming out of the children's corner.  He thought it was a cat’s bone or something."

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