BOSTON — An island in Boston Harbor is the unlikely final resting place of nearly 2,000 people - but you’d never know it.
No headstones marking graves or even a single monument to honor the lives buried there, 11-acre Rainsford Island sits just six miles off the coast of downtown Boston, housing the remains of 1,777 people.
Among those buried on the island are 109 Civil War veterans, 2whose names aren’t even on a small sign somewhere on the island.
But one local man is hoping to change that.
Bill McEvoy, an army veteran and retired Newton court magistrate, spent the last four years digging through every recorded death on the deserted island.
“People were neglected in life and forgotten in death," said McEnvoy. “These people are out there they don’t even have the dignity of anybody knowing who they are.”
Throughout his journey to give the thousands of forgotten deceased people some dignity, McEnvoy also learned of the tragedy behind each death. People he describes as poor and unwanted were shipped off to the island and exiled under unconscionable circumstances from Colonial times until the beginning of the 20th century, never to be spoken of again.
“Tragedies, young children, women who gave birth [and] had babies with syphilis,” said McEnvoy. “Some of the vicious poor, drunkards, strumpets, the common denominator is poverty and they had no one on the mainland who could help them.”
McEnvoy, who was a district court magistrate for 34 years, is hoping to bring some change to the island “for the benefit of the people.”
While he no longer holds that power, he’s hoping someone who does can help find a way to acknowledge and honor those he believes should not be forgotten.
“It’d be very easy to resolve this and do something,” said McEnvoy. “It would start a healing process, it’s a matter of respect.”
McEnvoy recently published a book about the island, citing the names of the veterans and all the others buried on Rainsford Island.
“I was able to establish all the deaths at Rainsford from about 1800 to 1898," said McEnvoy. “I kept going because I wanted to speak for those people. These people were wronged, they were wronged seriously.”
Now, he’s lobbying officials to least put a marker or even a fence at the cemetery on the island, which is owned by the city of Boston. Both city and state approval would be needed for that.
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