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USF to help county identify buried paupers

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By LINDSAY PETERSON

lpeterson@tampatrib.com

Published: September 17, 2009

TAMPA - For decades, people who couldn't be identified or who died with no money for their funerals were left for the county to bury.

Without headstones or even markers, they now lie beneath a piece of ground near Hillsborough Avenue and 22nd Street.

On Friday, University of South Florida professors and students will use the latest ground-search, mapping and documentation technologies to reconstruct the history of Hillsborough County's paupers cemetery.

They will map the site and begin the laborious process of matching the remaining grave markers to county records to determine who is buried in the cemetery.

The site was used as a cemetery for indigent and unidentified people until the 1960s, but graves were marked only with numbers, and any records on who might be buried there are incomplete.

Hillsborough officials asked USF experts to help them restore dignity to the cemetery by identifying its occupants, said USF spokeswoman Vickie Chachere.

While helping the county, the anthropology, history and geophysics students also will have a rare opportunity to use geophysics and technologies for archaeological inquiry to search a sensitive area without digging.

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834.

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