Sheridan funeral home working to find permanent places for backlogged cremains
Sheridan funeral home working to find permanent places for backlogged cremains
By Tracee Davis
The Sheridan Press
Via Wyoming News Exchange
SHERIDAN — When Shawn Wright and Johnie Garner gained access to a new area of the funeral home where they work, they uncovered a small closet that housed a big project.
“What happened is our current owner took over this facility about a year and a half ago. When we got in here, we realized there were many cremains that had not been given to family members,” Wright said, explaining when Kevin and Carla Sessions bought out a previous partnership at Champion Funeral Home.
In that transaction, they gained access to a new part of the facility they previously had not maintained.
In a medium-sized coat closet in one of the hallways, there were at least 60 urns stacked neatly on high shelves lining the ceiling. Each one was labeled with identifying information, including a range of death dates that went back 40 or more years. Wright and Garner are now working to find appropriate burial sites for each one with the ultimate goal of emptying out that closet. They are about halfway there.
“Whenever we get time, we do research on them and try to get them buried or with a family member or whatever we can,” Garner said, indicating the process of finding the next-of-kin takes sleuthing and a little bit of luck, as many contacts are scattered all over the country.
The team started with the one that had been there the longest: a woman named Hulda Miller, who died in 1916 and was cremated in Seattle. Her artisan-crafted copper urn was shipped to Sheridan in a nondescript cardboard box addressed to Frank E. Miller.
“We were like, ‘Wow! Why did she come here?’” Wright said, indicating that being cremated back at that time was rare.
Garner delved into research and was able to piece together Miller’s family line. She learned that Miller’s son, Fred Miller, became a well-known photographer of the Crow Tribe. He was eventually accepted into the tribe and married a native woman.
“We figured she was being shipped back here so her son could come get her cremains and take her back to the ranch he had out there on the reservation,” Garner revealed. However, the urn was never picked up from the funeral home.
“We don’t know what happened,” Garner said. “I do know they had a horrible snowstorm that year and (Fred Miller) lost most of his cattle. That could be a reason he never made it to Sheridan, or maybe he forgot about her—we just don’t know.”
Whatever the reason, Hulda Miller’s ashes stayed in storage at the funeral home for 103 years (along with a growing collection of others) until their recent “discovery” by the conscientious funeral home employees. Garner ultimately found Hulda Miller’s living descendants.
“Doing the research, I found out her grandson was Carroll O’Connor,” she said, referring to the actor with a 40-year career that included playing the character Archie Bunker in the 1970s the sitcom All In the Family. During the entirety of his famous career, O’Connor’s grandmother’s ashes were stored in Sheridan, waiting to be claimed.
“I tracked down (O’Connor’s) sister-in-law’s children, who were great-grandchildren, that still have land out there on the reservation.”
Mary Reynolds, a violinist in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, knew of her Great Grandmother Hulda only via online research on genealogy websites. When she got the call from the Sheridan funeral home saying the remains were still unclaimed, it immediately made sense.
“I knew exactly where every one of my other relatives were at,” she said, indicating she had specifically looked up burial plots of her ancestors during her family research. “But I knew nothing about where Hulda was… It is incredible that she was there at that funeral home for 103 years,” Reynolds said. “When I made the connection, we were just blown away. (Garner) said, ‘What do you wish to do?’”
Reynolds coordinated to have her great grandmother’s remains be buried in the Hardin, Mont., cemetery, next to her son, the photographer.
“I thought I wouldn’t find it right, having never known her, to have her shipped to Dallas. It was clear as a bell she should be with her son,” she said. “I felt it was the right thing to do. I really found it fell on me, and not in a bad way. This has come through all of this connection, and I was left with the beautiful duty to lay her to rest.”
In addition to the large geographic spread that naturally occurs as generations live out their lives, an additional challenge has been the phenomenon that people often use more than one name in their lifetime.
“Back in that time, sometimes people used their middle name or just randomly used some other name,” Wright said, referring to the case of a woman named Sarah, who had died in 1920. She often used other generic feminine names, like Jane. “She had so many aliases.”
Even the names on her urn and the box containing the urn were different. After everything was straightened out, those remains were buried at the cemetery in Big Horn.
“So now, she is buried with her husband’s former wife, and he is buried in California,” Wright laughed, admitting that situation is still better than perpetually sitting in a closet at the funeral home.
Wright, who also serves as a Sheridan County Deputy Coroner, said they got substantial help from Tammy Mansfield to get many urns buried at the Oregon Trail Veterans Cemetery.
“She works with missing Americans and she helps bury veterans. She came and helped us clear out some. She did a lot of research and paperwork and found out which ones were veterans, and she got them buried in Evansville last June,” Wright said. “Sometimes, we can bury a veteran’s spouse with them, so she took some wives with her. We sent down 20.”
The staff at Champion Funeral Home is working, as time permits, to find permanent resting spots for the rest of the cremains that have come into their custody. They generally work on one case at a time in order to keep the details of the individual’s family structure intact and distinct from other cases.
It is unclear why so many cremains piled up in the custody of the funeral home. Informal calls to several other similar businesses around the state confirm that while funeral directors sometimes hold on to ashes for a period of time due to myriad reasons, the accumulation of more than five dozen urns is unusual.