The first time I saw a potter’s field was with my dad back in 2010 in Fresno, California. We spent the day touring tombstones, with my dad as tour guide, starting with visits to family gravesites in three, privately-owned cemeteries, including Mountain View and Holy Cross, and St. Peter’s – all located in a small corner of West Fresno. Following that, he showed me the local potter’s field, where thousands of people who couldn’t pay for private burial or cremation, have been buried by the county since the late 1800s.
Exploring Cemeteries: How a Shared Passion Led to a Father’ Legacy and Daughter’s Mission
Image via the author.
When we arrived at the Fresno County Cemetery we couldn’t figure how to get in or if we were even allowed to enter, exemplifying how hidden, how opaque this physical space was. I write about this moment in my newly published book, Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins (Rutgers University Press, 2025), which bears witness to the disparities in death and dying faced by some of society’s most vulnerable and marginalized and asks the reader to consider their own end-of-life and disposition plans within the larger context of how privilege and access plays a role in what we want versus what we get in death.
“I peered through the holes in the fence, amazed at what we were looking at adjacent to the lush green lawns of Holy Cross Cemetery. On the other side of the fence from where we stood lay a barren lot absent of any obvious indicators that it was a place of burial…As I processed the views of this neglected lot, I struggled for words and meaning…It appeared an empty field, land without a purpose, not land that held the bodies of thousands.”
The contrast between the Catholic cemetery and the county cemetery was stark and haunting. The county cemetery had no grave markers or headstones, only weeds and strips of cement with numbers etched in to indicate each burial plot. I felt humbled. At that point in my life, I hadn’t thought a lot about death, and I certainly hadn’t thought about how much it cost to be dead, and what that meant for people who had little to no financial resources The image of that field along with a deeper understanding of how disparity follows people into death led to my ten-year investigation that culminated in writing my first book, Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins.
History of the Potter’s Field
Potter’s fields have been burial sites for the poor, unclaimed, or otherwise marginalized in death for centuries. The term comes from a biblical reference (Matthew 27:7) to land purchased by the priests with Judas’s returned silver, which was used to bury strangers. The story goes that the land was made up mostly of clay, and therefore useless for farming. That clay was also what led to the name “potter.” How much of that part of the story is true, I can’t say, but the “undesirable” clay soil serves as a suitable metaphor for the people who find their final resting place in a potter’s field.
Due to the stigmatized nature of potters’ fields, the term is starting to fall out of favor. The term connects death with poverty and isolation and centers the identity of the deceased on their lack of resources or social ties. This outdated language feels detached from modern discussions about dignity, equity, and individual rights in death care, potentially obscuring systemic causes by framing the burial as a matter of fate or charity, rather than inequality.
There is absolutely no shame for the individual whose disposition ends up being handled by the county. The shame lies with a society that hasn’t done enough to create safe and supportive environment around dying and death for those in our communities who need it.
So, who ends up in a county cemetery? The most common scenarios that lead someone to a county disposition include:
- Someone for whom no next of kin can be found or exist, and who also has no resources for private disposition.
- Someone for whom there is next of kin but they are either unwilling to pay in order to claim the body, or willing to claim their loved one, but unable to pay and so therefore have to relinquish that responsibility to the county.
These deceased folks are often referred to as “unclaimed,” which isn’t an entirely accurate description, but for now, the best, and least offensive one in use. Disposition laws regarding “unclaimed” people vary from state to state, and the responsibility for caring for these folks in death, including handling burial or cremation, falls to individual counties or each state. This makes for a very confusing process that’s housed within an already hidden and opaque system.
Digging In
In my dad’s retirement, he began volunteering for the genealogy society at the local library. He started mapping for all the cemeteries in Fresno to help people who were researching their family tree or looking for a long-lost relative. Each cemetery has their own records and maps, but they may be hard copy, incomplete, and they weren’t in one searchable place alongside the other local cemeteries. To facilitate the mapping, my dad began spending a fair bit of time in many of the Fresno cemeteries, talking to cemetery directors, reviewing what they had for documentation and trying to fill in the blanks when the records were incomplete.
He also began posting grave information on Find-A-Grave, which I think of kind of like social media for the dead. Much of the content is user generated by folks like my dad and includes information such as name, date of birth and death, the cemetery name and information, and grave location. Sometimes there are memorials written on the page, a bio or an obituary, or pictures of the headstones. People who lived elsewhere would sometimes post looking for help finding a loved one’s grave in Fresno from someone local.
Our passion for exploring cemeteries has culminated in a shared passion for family history, memorialization, and advocacy.
My dad would keep any information he had on the cemetery and the gravesite he was looking for to assist him in locating it. He’d drive out in his pickup, where he always kept a small brush and gardening scissors, to sweep off dirt and cut away weeds. He did this mostly to get a better photograph of the headstone, but also as a way to care for the grave marker and show respect to the person interred.
Part of that day I’d first gone out with my dad to see the county cemetery was spent time hunched over, trying to read a headstone to determine if it’s “the one.” It can be surprisingly hard to find a gravesite, and sometimes we’d find a location that seemed to be accurate, but there’d be no marker or headstone.
In doing all this work for the genealogy society, my father ended up connected to the County Coroner’s office, which had stacks of boxes in their basement filled with the records of people buried in the county cemeteries. He expanded his cemetery mapping project and created a searchable database that houses information when available, including name, age, race, date of internment, on the 11,776 people interred in Fresno County Cemeteries.
My Dad’s Legacy
My dad bristles at the idea of being thanked for this work, far too humble for his own good. One of the cemetery directors in Fresno, Sheri from Ararat Armenian Cemetery, has repeatedly said how much my dad has helped her with the work she does. She’s even given him the playful nickname “cemetery fairy” in reference to how he seemed to appear out of nowhere and provided a wealth of information and assistance with the records and history of Ararat.
Our tombstone touring has forged a new bond between us, as we reach a different place in our adult relationship (me reaching middle age and him old age), Going to the cemeteries with my dad when I come home for a visit has become a tradition of sorts, a ritual. Each time, we spend a few minutes saying hello to family gone and those we never knew. Following a celebration for the launch of my book, we went to the cemeteries to visit family and then on to the county cemetery, where we placed flowers for those interred there. Our passion for exploring cemeteries has culminated in a shared passion for family history, memorialization, and advocacy.
For me, it started with my first visit to the county cemetery in Fresno with my dad, which led me to write my first essay on the subject in 2013, titled “Pushing Up Mare’s Tails.” After my grandmother’s death in 2012, I began reflecting on mine and my family’s attitude toward death, which eventually led me into death positivity where I read, watched, and listened to everything death-related that I could get my hands on. That first essay on the potter’s field then became an even larger one in 2016, and by 2017 I had embarked on a doctorate where I wrote the first draft of Too Poor to Die.
My dad reminds me that I’ll be charged with caring for his final resting spots. He claims he’s working on a map of places I’m to discreetly deposit bits of his cremains. I imagine his map will include places he loves—Kings Canyon, Millerton Lake, Santa Cruz, and quite possibly the cemeteries in which we now have spent so much time together.
I’m grateful to my dad for instilling in me a sense of compassion and civic duty, and a drive to speak out when there is injustice. Through all the work he has done for Fresno cemeteries he has illustrated how a bit of time and focused effort by one person can have a lasting impact that reaches far beyond. Even when my dad is gone, I will continue to carry this torch.
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