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To: wideminded

Yes... however paupers were usually buried in unmarked graves which were often in the same hole, side by side, or even on top of each other. Essentially, you have a mass of dirt and bones. If there was no match, the man dug up the wrong skull... as there were probably many others in nearly the same spot.


11 posted on 01/08/2006 7:44:47 PM PST by CurlyBill (Democratic Party = Surrender Party)
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To: CurlyBill; bigsigh; beaver fever

"In 1801 the St. Marx' Cemetery Trust had the third class plot in which Mozart and 15 to 20 others were buried retrenched, which was an automatic procedure every 10 years to enable graves to be reused. The cemetery, which opened in 1784, only had room for 7.000 graves and space was always at a premium. Wealthy residents bones were cleaned and placed in a charnel house with their names painted on the skull whereas the bones of the poorer folk were exhumed and crushed, reinterred in the Vienna Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) or disposed of in some other way. Mozart's grave was reopened by Joseph Rothmayer, the same grave digger/sexton who had buried him a decade earlier. Rothmayer said he knew before the burial what Mozart's ultimate fate would be so had tied wire around his corpse neck to enable him to distinguish the remains from the others, knowing the exact location of the body he sought it out and saved the skull from the bone crusher. "Joseph Rothmayer gave it to friend Joseph Radschopf, who in turn gave it to his friend Jacob Hyrtl in 1842. When Hyrtl died in 1868, his brother Joseph inherited the skull. Joseph was a Viennese phrenologist. Upon his death, Joseph's wife held onto to the skull until her death in 1901. It was then bequeathed to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg. In 1902 until the 1955, the skull was placed on public view in the Foundation's Museum". [1] Where it remains today, although no longer on public display ..." - link

34 posted on 01/09/2006 12:23:19 AM PST by wideminded
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