In the Royton cemetery, United Kingdom, a shocking fact has been revealed that has shocked both the local community and the authorities. The discovery of several common graves with hundreds of bodiesmostly you drink y childrenexposed an ancient practice that has left an open wound in many families who were unaware of the whereabouts of their loved ones for decades.
This discovery began when a woman searching for her twin brothers, one stillborn and the other dead within hours of life in 1962, found signs of what would later be confirmed as a mass grave in the cemetery. In an area of just 3 by 3 meters, remains of 145 babies stillborn, 128 children died after childbirth and 29 adults, all buried without proper identification or communication to their families.
According to reported The Sunlocal authorities confirmed that the mass burials were common practice until the 1980s. In those years, parents of stillborn babies were told that their children would be buried next to a “kind person” in an individual grave, but the reality was much grimmer: they were placed in simple cardboard boxes and buried in mass graves without ceremony or official recognition.
This lack of transparency institutional left thousands of families immersed in ignorance and pain, many of whom did not know where their children were buried until now. As detailed to Daily MailCouncilor Maggie Hurley, who has been leading the investigation, this represents “a social injustice on an unimaginable scale.”
The story of the woman who found the first grave is particularly moving. After years of fruitless searching, he managed to locate the site thanks to the help of Gina Jacobs, a mother who went through a similar experience on the Wirral and who had discovered her son’s burial site decades later.
This collaboration allowed access to previously inaccessible records. When she finally found her siblings, the woman described her relief mixed with deep sadness, especially knowing that her mother had died without knowing that her children were buried close to home.
This initial discovery led to further searches in the cemetery of Royton, where other mass graves were identified in different sections, including Catholic, Non-Conformist and Church of England areas.
According to Daily Mail, Local authorities recognized that the records of these burials were incomplete and that many names of the deceased were not available in the public database.
Of the 303 bodies found in the first mass grave, only 147 They were registered online. This situation was corrected after a thorough review by cemetery staff.
The discovery of these mass graves is not an isolated event. Over the past two decades, similar sites have been discovered in several regions of the UK, including Huddersfield, Lancashire, Devon and Middlesbrough. According to the Sands charity, dedicated to supporting families affected by perinatal and neonatal death, this practice was widely accepted until the mid-1990s. 1980.
According to Independent, one of the most emotional moments of this tragedy It was when three sisters found their brother buried in one of the graves. They had grown up believing the story their parents told them: that their brother had been buried next to a “kind woman” in a single grave. However, the truth was much more painful: he was in a mass grave, along with 303 bodies, without a coffin and without a marked grave.
