DES MOINES, Iowa — Urns containing the remains of dozens of unclaimed children have remained on the shelves of central Iowa funeral homes dating back to the 1940s.
But at Hamilton's Funeral Home in Des Moines, volunteers are working to ensure the community can hear the names of 36 children, some of which have never been spoken.
"A lot of these children were never taken home, you know, they went straight from the hospital to the funeral home and never anywhere else," explained Hamilton's Funeral Home funeral director, Lanae Strovers.
An event on Saturday, May 18 will provide the community with an opportunity to hear the names of these children at a public graveside service. The children will be laid to rest in one of the donated spaces at Avon Cemetery in Des Moines.
Strovers said there are so many different reasons for why children go unclaimed. For some, religious beliefs impede on a family's decision to take cremated remains home with them or to have any type of service. Strovers also said some remains were just left at the funeral home and they do not know why.
"There were children who were born in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, and I think that was the era when miscarriages weren't here was a stigma behind that," Strovers said. "So a lot of moms who lost a baby just didn't have a funeral or didn't feel comfortable taking those remains home."
The funeral home said they are able to connect the unclaimed children to relatives with the help of the medical examiner's office or with previous records about these children. But sometimes the funeral home have very little to no genealogy information, and in that case, they rely on distant relatives who reach out to Hamilton's to have the urn returned to that family, or buried in one of these events.
"I think we sometimes lose the fact that when someone was cremated that they were a person and a human, and I think that it's important that we put that reality back and people know these were babies," Strovers told Local 5.
Hamilton's Funeral Home and Avon Cemetery did a similar burial for civilians back in 2019, lying the cremated remains of 85 people, aged 26-96. Nearly every year, Hamilton's also does a service burying the remains of unclaimed veterans.