Genealogist and historian Anna Purgar is on a mission to restore dignity to forgotten psychiatric patients buried in unmarked graves in the Waikato.
She's already spent two years providing names for unmarked graves at Tokanui Cemetery, where 450 psychiatric patients from Tokanui Hospital were buried.
Now Anna has offered to help identify the graves of up to 1000 psychiatric patients from Christchurch's Sunnyside Hospital who were buried at Sydenham Cemetery.
A corridor in Tokanui Psychiatric Hospital, which opened in 1912 and closed in 1998.. Photo: Harley Plowman
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Discovering the names of people in unmarked graves involves a mix of research, genealogy and detective work, Anna tells Afternoons.
“What I did for Tokanui was print out a profile page I’d made up and each person is given a profile when they die, some basic details such as where they’re buried in the cemetery or where it says they were buried – it tended to sometimes change – and then look at the family with some basic genealogy stuff.
“That takes care of that part and then the next thing would be to contact Births Deaths and Marriages and see when they actually died or were a registered death. It’s sort of just digging around and seeing what I could find and going to their families and sometimes there would be family members looking, they’d know that their family member had been in the hospital but didn’t know what happened to them.”
- Related: Tribute to Tokanui patients unveiled (February 2016)
In those days there was a lot more secrecy and shame around mental illness, Anna says, and family members who were hospitalised were often not discussed again.
“It was just put under the carpet, you just don’t talk about that. Then, of course, over a couple of generations, people start asking who they were and dig a bit more and try to find where they were buried.”
Anna's investigation into unmarked graves began with the search for the resting place of her in-law’s great-great-grandmother. The family knew she had been admitted to the hospital but didn’t know where she was buried.
“We did some looking around and got told to try the Tokanui Cemetery. We tried to find information on the Tokanui Cemetery and that wasn’t very easy because it wasn’t a public document, it was something that had been put together by a genealogy society back in 1991 and it just listed some names and plot numbers.
“I had to start from scratch and work my way through there and we finally found where she was and, yes, there was her name. Then I kept looking and wanted to see what the cemetery looked like and I spotted on a particular photo that showed a paddock with the bones of dead animals and these ground divots of possible graves. That became very evident once we had a scan done and an aerial camera, that that was where the cemetery was and we found out, roughly, where she was buried.”
Once it became public that a cemetery was on the site, Anna started receiving phone calls from other families. It was around the time of Anzac Day and she discovered that there were some ex-servicemen buried there.
Now she's taking on the challenge of Sunnyside.