Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?
By Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans January 6, 2025
The story of the unclaimed is, urgently, a story for today. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, an estimated 2 to 4 percent of the 2.8 million people who died every year in the United States went unclaimed—up to 114,000 Americans. This is roughly how many Americans die annually from diabetes. And that number is increasing. In Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, the unclaimed used to make up 1.2 percent of adult deaths. That number inched up to 3 percent by the turn of the century—and it has continued to rise. The increase means that hundreds more residents every year end up in the Boyle Heights mass grave. In Maryland, one of the few states to keep track of unclaimed deaths over time, the percentage of people going unclaimed, adults and infants, has more than doubled in twenty years, from 2.1 percent of total deaths in 2000 to 4.5 percent in 2021.
COVID-19 made things worse. Medical examiners and coroners estimate that the number of people going unclaimed rose nationwide during the pandemic, resulting in as many as 148,000 unclaimed deaths each year. An investigation in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the fourth-largest county in the United States, revealed a 30 percent spike. Reports streamed in from across the country, underscoring the problem. The Chicago medical examiner’s office cremated twice as many unclaimed bodies in a three-month period in 2020 as in the entire previous year. Montcalm County in Michigan saw a 620 percent increase in unclaimed bodies in 2020. In Fulton County, Georgia, officials oversaw burials for 456 unclaimed bodies in 2021, 150 more than in previous years. In Hinds County, Mississippi, the coroner commandeered a refrigerator truck to store unclaimed bodies after the number ballooned.
Los Angeles County Department of Health Services
A 2020 headstone marks the communal grave where the remains of 1,900 people were laid to rest during the Ceremony of the Unclaimed Dead in Los Angeles.
There is no federal agency to track or oversee the unclaimed, just a patchwork of ad hoc local practices. In smaller cities and towns, burials for the unclaimed happen, if they happen at all, randomly. Ashes can languish for years in the desk drawer or office closet of a local county sheriff or wind up abandoned in private funeral homes.
The unclaimed mostly go uncounted and unseen. Megan Smolenyak is a genealogist and founder of Unclaimed Persons, a web-based group of more than four hundred genealogists who volunteer their sleuthing skills to resource-strapped forensic communities across the country. They locate kin when government employees cannot. Smolenyak describes the rising numbers of unclaimed as its own “quiet epidemic.”
This book grew out of our efforts to unravel the mystery of the unclaimed: Who are they? And why do they end up where they do? We follow four individuals who died between 2012 and 2019—some destitute and some with means, some with close relatives, some without—as they wend their way through L.A. County’s death bureaucracy. To piece together the story, we observed the work of county employees who care for the unclaimed: those who field phone calls from concerned neighbors, those who go into homes and hospitals to retrieve bodies, those who call families to try to compel them to claim, and those who divvy up the dead’s assets.
As we immersed ourselves in this world, the book morphed into a quest to better understand what we owe one another in death and in life. The unclaimed raise pressing existential questions: If you die and no one mourns you, did your life have meaning? If a common grave can now be the final destination for anyone, rich or poor, what does that say about us? What does it say about America? The answers we found were daunting and, at times, disheartening. The unclaimed bring today’s fractured families into sharp focus.
And yet, we found hope. Los Angeles, a city mocked around the world for being fickle and vain, points the way. Far from the glitter of Hollywood and ostentation of Rodeo Drive, nestled in quiet pockets of the county, some Angelenos have devoted their lives to making sure that the unclaimed are not forgotten. These citizens who have taken it upon themselves to care for the dead receive no money and few accolades. But they feel a moral responsibility to step in where traditional families have failed—creating new kinds of kinship, rebuilding local communities, and caring for the most overlooked, even in death.
