PAUPERS' GRAVEYARD A CHALLENGE TO NAVIGATE;HISTORIAN SAYS IT'S NOT SURPRISING FINDING JANE DOE TOOK 2 TRIES

There are only two unidentified women in a paupers' graveyard in Santa

Rosa, buried side by side after having died in the late 1960s, according to

local cemetery historian Jeremy Nichols.

Mystery has surrounded the remains of a ''Jane Doe'' that the Sonoma County

Sheriff's Department dug up Thursday.

Nichols, president of the Sonoma County Historical Society, said the county

has buried about 500 bodies over the past 60 years in a forlorn swale of land

between Santa Rosa's Memorial Park and the Rural Cemetery.

''It is no wonder that investigators had a difficult time finding the right

Jane Doe because both records and the cemetery are not well organized,''

Nichols said.

He has recently published a book, ''Potter's Field,'' about the county's

burial practices for indigents that notes the lowland downhill from the Rural

Cemetery periodically floods, and plot markers with few names or

identification symbols often shift.

Many plot markers are little more than concrete cylinders formed from

coffee-can molds.

A team from the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and a group of

anthropology students from San Francisco State University unearthed the wrong

Jane Doe on Wednesday. But on Thursday, they found the coffin they were

seeking after shifting their digging operation to a nearby plot.

Sheriff's officials have been tight-lipped about revealing what ''new

information'' prompted them to unearth the body of an unidentified woman

buried some 40 years ago.

Speculation centers on whether a confession has come to light, but

authorities have declined to provide details beyond saying the woman was

buried sometime in the 1960s.

Nichols said information gleaned from his book research verified that there

are two unidentified women listed as Jane Doe buried side by side in the

center of the graveyard.

Although he said he has not been contacted by authorities, he hesitated to

provide further burial information because he didn't want to jeopardize what

may be a criminal investigation.

Both women were buried in the late 1960s, within about two years of each

other, he confirmed.

Nichols' book centers on identification of indigents buried at the Chanate

Historic Cemetery located across the street from what's now Sutter Medical

Center. But, he said, his research also led him to the almost inaccessible

3-acre parcel downhill from the Rural Cemetery purchased by Sonoma County in

1944.

About that time, indigent burials ceased at the Chanate cemetery and

internments started at the newly purchased site.

''It still doesn't even have a name, and the county land doesn't belong to

the Rural Cemetery or to Santa Rosa Memorial Park,'' Nichols said. ''It is

like the sister who marries out of the family church and is never spoken of

again.''

Nichols said the first mention in public records of the new cemetery for

indigents was in Board of Supervisors minutes of 1945 when ''someone

complained that whoever was doing the burials wasn't keeping good records.''

''The find of the century was the record I found in Salt Lake City,

probably written by the county coroner, that listed all the names of indigents

from 1937 buried by the county, where they were buried, which funeral homes

handled the body and how much the county paid,'' Nichols said.

He said the records he discovered at the Family History Library at the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were not duplicates of anything he

could find in Sonoma County.

You can reach Staff Writer Bleys W. Rose at 521-5431 or

bleys.rose@pressdemocrat.com.