Buried in Anonymity, and Ignominy, Too

From the New York Times,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/us/10headstones.html?_r=1&hp

Buried in Anonymity, and Ignominy, Too

Max Whittaker for The New York Times

Headstones in a county cemetery at a Gold Rush site known as Negro Hill in El Dorado Hills, Calif.

By JESSE McKINLEY

Published: June 9, 2011

EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. — Wedged between a strawberry patch and an encroaching swath of suburbia, the men and women who lie in the Mormon Island Relocation Cemetery are a long-dead, little-noted lot: a Mr. Outen, for example, who died in December 1862, or Elizabeth, the wife of James, who died in April some two decades later.

But for the better part of five decades, the most notable tombstones at Mormon Island were those without names: 36 anonymous decedents whose grave markers shared a single, shocking label...