Mythology offers myriad guesses as to the final resting place of the human soul, from a ride with the ferryman to reincarnation to oblivion, but for the merely mortal remains, the options are generally much more straightforward.
In most cases, those arrangements are made by family, hopefully seeing to it that the deceased’s wishes are respected tastefully. But what happens when someone dies and no one is there to claim them?
“We have almost 80 cremains. They’re unclaimed. It could be like, the person doesn’t have any family left. Or for whatever reason, the family didn’t want to claim them,” said Grays Harbor County Coroner George Kelley. “A lot of them were indigent persons. Some of them have been here for many years.”
Kelley and the coroner’s office are working to find a final resting spot for those unclaimed dead.
“They’ve been in our care. We feel it’s time to put them to rest,” Kelley said. “We do want to inter them. We also want to make it accessible so if a family member does find someone years down the road they’ll be able to claim that.”
Remains come to the coroner’s office in a variety of ways, said Ryan Meister, deputy coroner, from being handed off by a funeral home to being discovered in a storage unit.
“Some of these were turned over from the funeral home,” Meister said. “They were paid for the family and just … left.”
The members of the coroner’s office have expended significant effort in locating surviving family for the cremains in their care, Kelley said.
“We’ve researched as much as we could. A lot of internet searching, ancestry websites, cemetery websites. We have some other electronic resources we can look up family members,” Kelley said. “We had a lot more. We probably reunited at least 10. We had some where we got in touch with family members and they weren’t even aware. They’d just lost contact.”
But the office has exhausted its options for trying to find anyone to reunite their remains with, Kelley said. Those who remain cover the gamut of the human experience, with the only common point that the thread of their life terminated here in Grays Harbor.
“It covers the entire map,” Kelley said. “Everyone’s an adult that was unclaimed. From all walks of life. Race, creed, color.”
Kelley said the members of the office mulled options from at-sea burials to the cemeteries and columbarium of the county.
“I don’t know which each individual person’s wishes were. There’s some places that will take them and release them to the sea, or to beaches or waterfalls,” Kelley said. “We do want to inter them.”
Kelley said he’s looked at the graveyards at the county, but hasn’t made a final decision.
“We have a few cemeteries in Grays Harbor. That’s where we’re kind of at. It’ll either be in a burial or a vault,” Kelley said. “I would love to have it all put together and send them off by the end of July.”
The office has released the list of unclaimed dead. Kelley urged anyone who recognized a name on the list and wished to claim it to contact the coroner’s office at 360-532-3015.
Unclaimed Remains
Ruth Howell 12/15/2003
Richard Hoover 2/23/2008
Eddie Lawrence 8/14/2008
Jose Miranda 10/4/2009
Larry Krause 10/27/2010
Ruby Elaine White 10/5/2011
Jeffrey Allen Wenrick 10/19/2013
Richard Locke 11/18/2013
Donald Sisk 4/3/2014
Cheryl Wright 7/30/2014
Charles Loftin 9/17/2014
Becky Jennings 2/25/2015
James Harvie 6/11/2015
Betty Louise Murray 5/23/2016
Nancy Casten 9/24/2016
Stacey Baldwin 10/25/2016
Robert Vance 1/24/2017
Jeffrey Graham 5/5/2017
Steven Thomas 6/7/2017
Terry Carnes 11/18/2017
Jerry Ann Detering 12/10/2017
Esquiel Maldonado 1/16/2018
Martin Writer 4/9/2018
Michael Anderson 4/22/2018
Jimmy Ray Farnsworth 6/16/2018
Donna Johnson 6/24/2018
Ricky Lee Powers 7/5/2018
Michael William Ellsworth 10/1/2018
Douglas Conn 10/28/2018
William Arthur Caffall 12/2/2018
Linda Farral 1/8/2019
Daniel Elliott 1/20/2019
Tom Replogle 4/13/2019
Frank Thomas Durkee 4/27/2019
Dennis Burnell Lenss 5/16/2019
Roland James York 6/9/2019
Harmon Timmons 6/13/2019
Wendy Marie Taylor 6/14/2019
Linda Hougham 6/17/2019
Jennie Lou Martinez 8/18/2019
Robert Ray Bednarski 8/22/2019
Kim Maria Herndon 9/29/2019
Gordon Mickiewicz 9/30/2019
Decca Rae Serquinia 11/17/2019
Larry Bynum 1/4/2020
William Harrold 1/12/2020
Earl Albert Dalton 2/10/2020
Alvie Dean Bisher 2/18/2020
James Michael Wallenbeck 2/18/2020
Raymond Darrell Moore 3/21/2020
William Teachout 7/21/2020
Karen Densmore 10/14/2020
Karl Fyles 1/4/2021
Robert Smith 1/30/2021
Donald Robert Edwards 3/12/2021
Siannon Birch 5/9/2021
Steven Hansen 6/5/2021
Marvin Hance 6/28/2021
Mark Joseph Smith 7/16/2021
Rodney Edwin Helm 8/6/2021
Charles Briggs 9/26/2021
Josephine Abbie 10/10/2021
Linda Bishop 11/29/2021
Aaron Inglott 1/25/2022
Ronald Ramsaur 2/7/2022
James Scott Tumbleson 3/6/2022
Margorie Greggor 3/15/2022
John Michael Harris 3/16/2022
Nancy Lang 4/9/2022
Andrew Loubal 6/22/2022
Ronald Ray Smith 7/28/2022
Randy Rodriquez 12/3/2022
Clyde Spikes 1/20/2023
Lola Wilhite 1/28/2023
Carol Brevard 2/2/2023
Danilo Cambronero 3/6/2023
