Archive of stories pre April 2007 | Jan. 14, 1956, marked the eighth consecutive morning Boston woke to gray skies and freezing rain. It was also the last day Albert Hitchcock, a 63-year-old World War I veteran, walked this earth in good health. By evening he would be hit by a car and laid up with a broken ankle. Three months later he would die of a pulmonary embolism.
Hitchcock's niece took care of the arrangements. She collected $2,485 from his life insurance policy and had his body cremated through a South End funeral home. And there, in a dusty cardboard box inside a basement filing cabinet, his ashes have sat ever since. Alongside them, the unclaimed ashes of another 100 souls -- some of whom died as long as six decades ago -- await a final disposition.
Arthur Hasiotis, director of the Commonwealth Funeral Service in the South End, whose father took care of Hitchcock's cremation, said he keeps the cremains in case anyone ever arrives to pick them up. But it is a day he does not believe will ever come.
'In the meantime, what can I do with them?" Hasiotis asked. 'Nothing. So I just let them sit."
Tens of thousands of abandoned cremains are piling up in funeral home storage closets, basements, and utility rooms nationwide. Some funeral directors send out annual letters pleading for the next of kin to pick them up. Many return unopened.
What can funeral directors do? If they pay for burial themselves, costs could quickly run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and if they dispose of them without permission, they might be sued. Even with some state guidelines, no one wants to tell a long-lost relative that grandpa's ashes are gone.
The issue is growing with the popularity of cremation. In 1975, fewer than 125,000 people were cremated nationwide, according to the Cremation Association of North America. By last year, that number was 700,000. About 5 percent, or 35,000, of those remains were not claimed last year. The number of cremations is projected to reach nearly 1.5 million by 2025, with 70,000 of those remains expected to be unclaimed.
'It's a big problem, and everybody is dealing with it," said Joel Magliozzi, who owns funeral homes in Medford and Andover and has ashes dating to the 1920s.
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