Finding Uncle Cesar

Tyler Brady

After Angel learned of his long-estranged Uncle Cesar’s death to COVID-19, he was unable to locate his body. I spoke with Angel in early 2022 to write an obituary for Cesar, and soon after discovered that he had been buried at Hart Island, New York’s potters field. This is the story of how a family dispute led Cesar to be buried on Hart Island, and how Angel’s lifelong search for him came to an end alongside a dirt road in America’s largest public cemetery. Angel’s experience on the island highlights the infrastructure mismanagement, lack of gravesite identification, and missing sense of memorialization that have created a negative atmosphere for visitors, while denying the interred a respectable place of burial.

Bio: My name is Tyler Brady, and I’m from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I became interested in oral history after a junior year project where I started a collection of written letters describing people’s personal experience improperly mourning the loss of a loved one due to financial obligation to work through the grieving process. This was in response to my frustration with Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, where he described basking in his sadness after losing his mother. I felt that my mother, who contributed a letter, could not have possibly done the same while raising two children alone following the loss of my father in early 2012. 

In 2020, I received my Bachelor’s Degree from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where my concentration was centered around 20th and 21st century American history, sociology, and ethnography. I focused primarily on activism, protest, and radical politics during the Sixties and Seventies. 

During much of my time studying history, I’d find myself yearning for a wider inclusion of personal testimony in academic articles and other source material. I enrolled in independent studies to further my understanding of the events that I based my concentration around, utilizing strictly memoir and autobiography. As a result, I became interested in how personal histories impact collective memory, which narratives are used to define historical events and the process through which they are accepted, and the confluence of culture with activism. 

I am eager to document the histories of activists and activist causes, both historically and currently. Additionally, I am interested in the lived experience of “everyday people,” and would like to continue conducting research on issues involving poverty, mass incarceration, and disability.