Annual ceremony honors unclaimed deceased indigents

Key Takeaways

Each year in the United States, nearly 150,000 people die without being claimed by family or loved ones. Families either can’t afford to lay a loved one to rest or no one is available to claim the body. As a result, the responsibility for laying an indigent person to rest is passed to county governments. The process varies by county, but the unclaimed are often cremated or buried in a mass grave system, unmarked, with no funeral service. 

While death is inevitable, receiving a proper burial is not. One of the counties around the country working to change that is Okaloosa County, Fla. Every Nov. 2, in commemoration of All Souls’ Day and the Day of the Dead, over 150 people gather to celebrate the lives of the unclaimed in Okaloosa County’s Beal Memorial Cemetery. 

A local choir sings “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” religious leaders share words of prayer, a cemetery bell rings and the name and date of death of each interred individual is entered into a Book of Remembrance.

“We this day remember those who are before us … and are reminded that life itself is a gift,” a clergyman said at the 2025 service. “When each of these beloved people were born, someone celebrated … Each one lived their lives walking through the deep valleys and up the steep mountains, who found joy and sorrow, who grieved when those around them died, and felt blessed when someone reached out to them and blessed their life. 

“Each of these, amongst all of us, were born equal to one another. On the day they died, either in the quietness of morning or in the darkness of night, alone or with a family who could not have the means to bury them, they are not forgotten.”

Okaloosa County Commissioner Carolyn Ketchel created the Lazarus Memorial Service in 2016. The project has provided a “dignified burial” for roughly 1,000 people, according to Ketchel. After getting elected as a county commissioner, she learned that the county was responsible for cremating indigent remains.

“I asked the question, ‘Well, what happens to them?’” Ketchel said. “And everyone said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Ketchel called up local funeral homes, asking if they still had indigent remains Okaloosa County contracted them to store. Many did, and offered to return them to the county, while others had already disposed of them. 

Ketchel said, "'We can do more than this.’”

More than 450 remains were returned to the county and received a burial in the first year of the memorial service, according to Ketchel. The idea for a memorial service came from a story in the Bible’s Book of Tobit, said Ketchel, who spent 20 years working in Christian radio. In the Bible, Tobit secretly buried Jewish people killed by the king, risking his life to honor theirs. 

Tobit “went out and he would give the dead a proper burial,” Ketchel said. “They were thrown over the wall at the time, because they were outcasts,” Ketchel said. “And he would go out and bury them. In the scripture, he says, ‘This is something you can do that no one can repay on Earth.’ And I just was very touched by that. 

“When I became a county commissioner and realized that there were people that were just cremated and no one claimed them, it was appalling to me. All of these people’s lives, they matter.”

The service is named for the Christian saint, Lazarus, “the poor man who went to paradise after death, after struggling on earth,” Ketchel said. Although the initiative’s inspiration was rooted in Christianity, people from all religious backgrounds are encouraged to participate, and roughly 30 faith organizations in the area are involved, according to Ketchel. 

“We reached out to all the [religions] — Jewish, Buddhist, everybody,” Ketchel said. “It was a very large net that went out. I sent them letters and said, ‘I have something I want everybody to work on.’”

“… That's another neat thing that was a side kind of thing that happened. It brought people together that had never talked in an interfaith way before.”

A combination of county funding and donations from religious organizations helped purchase seven burial plots in the center of the largest cemetery in the county, which is where the service is held and the deceased are interred. Each set of remains is held in a box bearing the individual’s name, and a Book of Remembrance is stored onsite at the cemetery to honor their memory. 

Because of the nature of indigent remains, much is usually not known about the deceased. The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office works to help fill in the gaps, Ketchel said. 

“The Sheriff’s Office makes every effort for like a year to try to talk to relatives and hunt down anybody that might know them,” Ketchel said. “We enter names in a Book of Remembrance, and we may not know their date of birth, but we know approximately their date of death, and we enter that, so that if a relative is ever looking for their loved one, they can find them.”

While indigent remains are unclaimed by definition, sometimes the deceased individual has family or loved ones aware of their death, but they just can’t afford to bury them or give them a service. The Lazarus Memorial Service can provide a sense of closure for them, Ketchel said.

“We’ve had individuals come to [the service] and say, ‘I didn’t have money to bury my mother. I’m so grateful that you were able to give her this dignified funeral,’” she said. 

The ceremony serves as a reminder that everyone’s life matters, and of the power of community, Ketchel said. 

“In the world, sometimes it seems like a lot of things go wrong,” she said. “This is a beautiful service that a community has come together to make a difference. For no matter what these people went through, or what faith community they’re in, it’s just such a great way to recognize that their lives matter.”