Fifteen Years, Then An Answer

Brian Haas: In a graveyard filled with those who died with no money and sometimes no family, he died with even less.

His gravestone simply read, "John (19) Doe."

He was the 19th unidentified man buried in the Bordeaux Cemetery. He lies in plot #555, a grave overlooking the Whites Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. And around him lie 1,001 others who died penniless and, in some cases, unmourned.

They're just a few of those buried in Nashville's paupers' graves. And the city says the numbers have been growing.

Names and dates of most of the 10,000 buried in Nashville's paupers' graves in cemeteries throughout the city are most likely lost forever.

Among those who died penniless this year: a country music writer who kept Johnny Cash's number in his Rolodex, the mother of a disabled adult daughter who cannot care for herself and a man whose death was mourned only by the social workers who helped him at the end of his life.

"No telling how many stories are in those graves," said Sylvia Nolan, a lifelong Nashville resident.

One of them, she just found out in March, is her son. His story spans 15 years of heartache, loss and mystery — one in which the answers lay just 3 miles away from her home in an anonymous grave.