Montgomery County has broken ground on a dedicated resting place for nearly 300 unclaimed or abandoned cremated remains currently sitting in storage at the coroner's office, with room to eventually hold more than 1,000. The project marks the first time a Pennsylvania coroner's office has built a facility specifically for this purpose, and it grew out of a moment that stuck with the county's top death investigator.
Montgomery County Coroner Janine Darby was touring her own office in 2023, before she took the top job, when she came across hundreds of unclaimed cremated remains stored on shelves in a file room, according to WHYY. “Everyone deserves to be remembered,” Darby said, describing why she felt the office needed to do better than keeping boxes of cremains tucked away out of sight. The Montgomery County Coroner's Office, the station notes, is Pennsylvania's largest, investigating thousands of deaths reported as unexpected or suspicious each year, determining causes and manners of death, and helping families find low-cost burial options when money is a barrier.
Nearly 300 Remains, Room for Over 1,000
The coroner's office currently has almost 300 abandoned or unclaimed cremated remains in its possession, per the station's report. The new resting place is being built in a grassy, “peaceful” area next to the coroner's office headquarters and will have space for more than 1,000 cremated remains, with labeled shelves inside and an internal fan to guard against moisture and humidity. Other coroner's and medical examiner's offices in the region will also be able to use the space for cremated remains in their custody, the same account notes.
Darby said she hopes the facility is completed by the end of December, though that timeline reflects her own expectation rather than a confirmed finish date. Once built, the county plans to hold a formal ceremony in the spring to place the remains inside, and the site is expected to be open to members of the public who wish to pay their respects. Darby said she hopes the resting place never actually reaches capacity.
A Public List Meant to Reunite Families
The coroner's office publishes the names of unclaimed decedents in a public list on its website, a practice meant to give family members a chance to come forward and claim their relatives' remains before they end up permanently unclaimed. Darby said the new facility is designed to treat people who were otherwise overlooked with the same respect and dignity owed to anyone else in death.
The problem is not unique to Montgomery County. CBS News Pittsburgh reports that coroner's offices across Pennsylvania are seeing a growing number of unclaimed remains, from Westmoreland County — where new coroner Tim Carson found 57 unclaimed cremated remains in storage in 2022, some dating back to 1989 — to Washington County, which has investigated 218 unclaimed-remains cases since 2016 with 135 still unresolved, and Allegheny County, which logged 133 unclaimed remains between 2019 and 2023.
Neighboring Counties Face the Same Backlog
In Montgomery County itself, the number of unclaimed individuals peaked at 38 in 2020 and has stayed in the high 20s most years since, up from just 11 in 2014, according to PhillyBurbs. Neighboring Bucks County saw its own highest totals — 34 and 35 unclaimed deaths — in 2022 and 2023. Since 2019, both counties have posted names of the unclaimed online and revisited older cases to search for family or final-arrangement information, the outlet reports. More recently, Bucks County's coroner has turned to advanced DNA technology and forensic genealogy, working with private labs to build DNA profiles that can be compared against public genealogy databases in hopes of identifying unknown individuals.
Other Pennsylvania counties have tackled their own backlogs through burials rather than standalone facilities. Lancaster County planned to bury the cremated remains of 90 unclaimed bodies at Millersville Mennonite Cemetery in October 2022, five years after interring 46 others at Mellinger Mennonite Cemetery, according to LNP | LancasterOnline.
What State Law Requires
Pennsylvania law lays out clear obligations for handling bodies that go unidentified or unclaimed. Under the state's county code, such a body must be removed to the county morgue or an authorized substitute facility, where the coroner may preserve it while working to determine identity, responsible parties, and the cause and manner of death, according to the Pennsylvania General Assembly. County commissioners, in consultation with the coroner, are then responsible for arranging removal of the body to and from the morgue and for its eventual burial. The same statute requires coroners to investigate deaths that are sudden, suspicious, violent or traumatic.
For Darby, the new resting place is ultimately about closing the gap between that legal obligation and something more human. “Everyone deserves to be remembered,” she said, according to the same report — a sentiment she has tied directly to the idea that the people whose ashes have sat on shelves for years still deserve dignity and respect in death.
