Imagine enduring a difficult life within the confines of a mental institution, only to be laid to rest in an unmarked grave identified by nothing more than a number. No headstone with your name and dates. Even in death, you remain unreachable, as the records that could guide loved ones to your grave are withheld. This is the ongoing injustice faced by those buried in the defunct cemetery at Willard Asylum in Seneca County, New York.
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| Find A Grave memorial page for the person buried in grave 13. New York will not allow anyone to see who lies in this grave. |
The facility was known by several names over the years. Asylum and Insane are words that have fallen out of favor in current American English. Willard State Hospital is a defunct facility that housed tens of thousands of people deemed "insane." The remnants are located in Willard, a hamlet of Romulus, Seneca County, New York.
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| Modern map showing location of Willard Hospital and its cemetery |
Willard was one of the many state hospitals created in the 1870s in response to a growing movement to treat the mentally ill better in sprawling campuses and formally trained staff. (See my article on Nurse Julia Flanagan.) A centralized state facility relieved the counties of financial burdens of insane paupers. Most patients were too poor to provide for themselves. And some of them were mentally ill by today's standards.
And- they were called inmates, not patients as we do today. They were literally locked up with no recourse. They had few recognized rights. Medications to treat schizophrenia were invented in the 1950s.
Part of the hospital grounds includes a cemetery where the patients were buried. Most plots were not marked, meaning no stones were erected. (This was a standard practice. See my article mentioning burials of Edith Duryea and her child in Laurel Hill in Secaucus, New Jersey.) Records were created and maintained over the decades and were sent to the New York State Archives. Today the cemetery is in disrepair.
Here's the problem: the records of this cemetery are prohibited from being viewed. Why? No logical reason, in my opinion. The boxes of records are described on the webpage of the Archives' finding aid. A New York State law is cited as the authority for blocking access.
"Access Restrictions. Restricted in accordance with Mental Hygiene Law, Section 33.13, relating to confidentiality of clinic records."
I can't excerpt the wording in this law that prohibits access to cemetery records because NONE EXISTS. This law clearly pertains to confidentiality of very recent patient CLINICAL records because it discusses who may receive records: police, targets of the patient, and close family members. There is no mention of great great grandchildren's access. The spouses and children of patients in these sought-out historical records are also dead. They can't request access to records.
There is a bill in the New York State Legislature that would make public these burial records.¹ It's a shame that all that effort and time must be lodged to counteract a deliberate misapplication of a law.
If the burial records were allowed to be viewed at the Archives, I doubt many people would look at them. Part of the reason is that they would essentially be inaccessible to people who do not live close to Albany and can visit during the few hours the building is open.
If the burial records were digitized and placed online, a few more people would view them, but not many. Where is the harm? I see only benefit. The "inmates" had no rights once locked away. Prohibiting access to their burial records completes their sequestration from society and their families. It's simple cruelty.
Inhabitants of institutions were included on the federal census every ten years. Although a person was removed from society, this process and their status at Willard was not a contemporaneous secret. Below is a page from the 1900 federal census for Romulus and Ovid listing patients at Willard State Hospital.
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| 1900 United States Federal Census Patients at Willard State Hospital Ovid and Romulus Towns, Seneca County, New York |
Clinical records of inmates can include detailed descriptions of their family relations and the circumstances that lead to placement in the state hospital. This provides missing insight into past generations and is invaluable to genealogical studies.
For further reading on advocacy of Willard Hospital, please see the blog The Inmates of Willard.
At Find A Grave, 727 burials are listed. Some veterans and numbers have pictures of stones. Most are names without pictures.
Other States
Other states have placed records online relating to mental health records and burials of the these people.
Below are images from records available for Rhode Island and California available on Ancestry.
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| Burial ledger. Dexter Asylum in Providence, Rhode Island. Collection at Ancestry "Providence, Rhode Island, U.S., Dexter Asylum and Almshouse Records, 1828-1956" |
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| Case Books, Personal Description List (Females), 1900-1920 Sonoma State Hospital, Eldridge, California Collection at Ancestry "California, U.S., State Hospital Records, 1856-1923" |
Future Endeavors
It's time to release these stigmatized records in all states and allow researchers to uncover family mysteries and bring to light the historical treatment of people deemed mentally ill.
¹ New York Senate Bill S08903 and Assembly Bill A10242, 2025–2026 legislative session.
