Decorating the Pauper's Graves

It's a Memorial Day tradition in the Phillips family- we decorate graves. Of course we put flowers on our family members' graves who have passed away, but there are two other graves that we continue to put flowers on each year.

My great grandfather, Theophilus Phillips, began putting flowers on the graves of "the paupers" in the Roosevelt, Utah city cemetery years and years ago. Great Grandpa Phillips handed this tradition down to his son and my grandfather, Ted Phillips, who always made it a point to put flowers on those graves as well. My mother, Marsha Phillips Oleen and her brother, Fred Phillips (who passed away in 2002) kept this tradition up and have passed the importance of it on to the next generation, so my cousins & my brother and I take our children each year and place flowers on those graves as well.



It was important to Great Grandpa Phillips that they have a memento on their graves each Memorial Day as they had no family to mourn them and didn't have much money for burial or proper headstones. The concrete slabs that mark their graves are crude and each year we etch out FC Dunham's name with a pocket knife and trim the grass that covers the small stone that marks his or her final resting place.





Hopefully, someday we'll meet Charles and Emma Sexton and learn who they were, how they lived and how they died. For now, we'll make sure someone remembers them and pays tribute to them each year so that they know someone on this earth cared about them, if only in death.