Welcome to the Hart Island Project, an interdisciplinary artist and community collaboration. Please register to search the database and to access the film, posthumous blog and burial records. You are invited to participate in relocating a diverse, international community of people who died in New York City.
The City Cemetery occupies 101 acres in the Long Island Sound on the eastern edge of New York City. It is the largest tax funded cemetery in the world. Prison labor is used to perform the mass burials that now number 800,000. Relatives must enter the prison system to visit the grave of a baby. There is no map of the burials and no one is permitted to visit a specific grave. The Department of Correction restricts visitation to those who can document the burial of a family member buried on Hart Island. Records at this location consist of intact mass graves since 1985.
The mission of the Hart Island Project is to make the largest cemetery in the United States visible and accessible. The process of reclaiming the identities of those buried is a global, community effort. A system has been created at this site for volunteers to enter data from pages acquired through Freedom of Information Law. Older records are available at the Municipal Archives. Many burial records kept on Hart Island were destroyed in a fire set by vandals in 1977.
Registered visitors to this site may search the expanding database and submit stories, images and links to this emerging image of a global community.