Tampa's first-ever cemetery coordinator helps preserve historic cemeteries now owned by the city
TAMPA, Fla. - Old cemeteries filled with people who died long ago are becoming the responsibility of local governments.
The City of Tampa now owns seven cemeteries, and finding out who is buried where is becoming a full-time job for city employee Neris Reyero.
"It's a lot of research, a lot of fact checking," she said.
In some cases, the names are right there on the headstones, but in old graveyards there are mysteries that require some digging.
Neris Reyero is a detective when it comes to decoding graveyard records in Tampa.
Reyero spent 21 years working in city offices, but now she is Tampa's first cemetery coordinator. She spends hours comparing maps and records with plots in graveyards, and much of the information is incomplete.
"We have sections of the map, but we don't have a complete map," she said as she pieced together clues.
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There are handwritten records written in the 1940s, which apparently made sense to the cemetery owner who wrote them, but not to Reyero.
"It is a puzzle," she laughed.
Reyero is Tampa's first cemetery coordinator.
Standing in the Memorial Park Cemetery near MLK and 22nd Street in Tampa, there are more than 15,000 people buried. It's one of several cemeteries that were once privately owned, but the city must now care for. They fall under Tampa's Parks and Recreation Department.
"We have now six other cemeteries, and I help manage all of those cemeteries," shared Reyero.
Tampa was forced to pay a property flipper $100,000 for Memorial Park after he snatched the property at a tax auction. Reyero's goal is to digitize the records and build a database that descendants can search.
Much of the graveyard records are incomplete.
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"Being able to figure out that puzzle for them and figure out where their family member is very rewarding," she said.