The 1940s were 80 years ago. The adults of that era who may have known about this, are all dead. Even the youngsters back then would have started dying off of old age by now, as well.
Documentation? Paperwork? Newspaper accounts? All buried in time or in boxes in the basement or at the back of old storage files somewhere
I mean, I run into young folks all the time who don't have a clue what happened 10 years ago, let alone 80+ years ago.
Things don't get passed on. Things get forgotten. Eventually, one day, no one knows anything about a graveyard under the school yard.
Not hard to see how this could happen or existed and no one alive today would know anything about it.
But the school was opened in 1960. "In the 1940's" could be anywhere from 1940 to 1949. The school must have started construction before it opened.
That means less than 20, and as little as 10 years between the time it was a cemetery and when the area was planned to be a schoolyard.
“Not hard to see how this could happen or existed and no one alive today would know anything about it.”
You might want to finish that statement with no one cared about it either as for almost 60 years nothing was mentioned and nothing obviously was marked. And it stated in the article that “a person” finally said something. One?
rwood
In my little town the Methodist had a cemetery where about 300 graves were located. The Methodist church had allowed to grow up and a local contractor approached them about buying and developing the property and they sold it to him. My Dad had grown up as a kid in the 1950’s in this area and him and his brothers and friends had camped out on the edge of the cemetery even during the summers.
He told the local government you have approximately 300 graves in this area you are about to let someone build houses on. They could have cared less. No bodies were moved, tombstones were knocked down, buried or outright removed. There are now several houses built over this old cemetery and none of them know what lies below their homes except for me and a few others. The Methodist church nd the local governments behavior was an abomination, more so for the church, all they saw was $$$.