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Mike DiRocco has identified over 90 infants buried on unconsecrated ground in Wildwood Cemetery, specifically located in the Mt. Carmel section. Through countless hours of research, he has found the unconsecrated patch of ground where almost 100 unbaptized babies were buried and forgotten. Mike's efforts are the sole reason many families received closure, even over 50 years after their loss.
Wildwood Cemetery in Williamsport was formally founded on Aug. 18, 1863, "because of the tranquility found in the lush, rolling hills on which it rests" according to the cemetery website. However, the area has been a burial site for much longer than 1863, having been maintained by various churches and properties.
Caleb Hipple, Wildwood Cemetery assistant general manager, estimates that over 60,000 graves are on the property. However, that number may be significantly larger as "many records have been lost over time to floods and moving locations."
Finding the unmarked gravesite of so many infants came out of a promise Mike made to his grandfather, Ken DiRocco. "He had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and given two months to live and asked me to take care of the family plot," Mike said. "Thankfully, he recovered and is still doing well."
Ken said of Mike, "When I ask him for help, he never fails me. He's a hell of a good young man and he is a great grandson."
"I've always felt a strong closeness with all my extended family. Grandparents. Aunts and uncles. Great aunts and uncles. Cousins. Second cousins and so on," Mike said. "The way we were and are all connected, has always been something that has been important to me. I cherish it. This project has brought a lot of us together, and I am so grateful for it."
Ken had a stillborn brother, Mike's great-uncle, born on March 22, 1922, named Tony DiRocco. Tony was buried on unconsecrated ground belonging to St. Joseph the Worker Parish without a ceremony or headstone due to being an unbaptized stillborn. Mike's path to naming Tony took him on a journey of deciphering and publishing online a list of infant names buried on the unconsecrated ground in the Mt. Carmel Cemetery area.
Mike inspects properties for potential home buyers as a profession and is the owner of Rock Home Inspections. However, his adoration for research and learning has remained his underlying passion since childhood.
"I've always loved doing research," Mike said. "When I was young, It was baseball and football. I'd research the history of the sports by reading all kinds of books. Some obscure. I still love talking baseball history!"
"The motivation is hard to explain...I don't know what has been pushing me to do it, it is just a good thing to do," Mike said of the project. "When I realized that there were many more babies buried on unconsecrated ground, I put it out there, everything I was doing and what I was looking for, and I got over a hundred responses and comments asking me questions about family... I ended up putting all 94 names on Facebook after I looked through all the cemetery records and matched it all up with ancestry and found parents…I had to decipher the names from the 100-year-old writing, so it took a really long time."
Mike went on to try and contextualize the actions that led to these infants being lost to time.
"From what I understand it was nothing that anybody talked about after that. You almost felt shame about it. After it was done, it was done. The siblings who were alive and knew they were buried had no idea where in the cemetery they were."
Lisa Guerrisky Jenks was one of the family members present for both the Mass and ceremony to consecrate the ground in early November. She said she attended after discovering her twin family members were buried on the property and their names incorrectly recorded in the ledger. "I was the only sibling of my family that my dad had told of the twins' death," she said. "I have many family members buried in that cemetery [and] I found out about the babies through Mike's [Facebook] post. I attended the mass and the ceremony at the cemetery and both were very emotional and at the same time beautiful!"
This bittersweet notion encapsulates much of Mike's work. "I like to dig into things and investigate things, that's exciting. But after a while, it wasn't really exciting, it was heartbreaking." Mike said. "How terrible it must have been to lose a child and you can't even bury it properly or give it a stone marker? It's hard to say the way I feel... it's not so much pride, more satisfaction. It was exciting to get other people involved and get clues which led me closer to the day I finally found the babies. It was enjoyable to see how many people came together."
Mike's efforts at the cemetery have helped end a lifelong state of grief for the families of almost 100 infants. Father David Bechtel of Saint Joseph the Worker's Parish who blessed the unconsecrated ground gave insight as to why this mass of unmarked infant graves appeared in the first place:
"The [Catholic] church teaches that baptism is necessary for salvation...if a baby is not baptized how can it be saved? Catholic theologians didn't want to say infants were in hell, but theologians had a hard time reconciling how infants can be saved before being baptized. They were considered naturally happy in limbo, and prior to Vatican II, there was a rule concerning unbaptized babies being buried on unconsecrated ground. We have since changed our pastoral practice. That is no longer the case now. That is my understanding of why back in the day it would have been dealt with in that manner."
"(Mike) has concern for other people...just thinking of setting up this mass and doing this for others is something I had never even considered and he's showing he's thinking about others and ways that we can serve them...he was instrumental in coordinating, making sure everything was in place, giving a speech...even for those who have lost family members... there's little that's more painful than the death of a child, and he knew this would offer some sort of closure to the grief that never really ends."
Mike DiRocco is now working with Caleb Hipple on a monument for the unmarked graves. "The monument is going to be a mother holding a child," Hipple said, "and it is going to include some if not all of the names of the deceased infants in the Mt. Carmel section of the cemetery."
Donations towards the monument can be made at wildwoodcemeterypa.com/donations/the-unconsecrated-ground-marker.
"(Mike) is a really awesome guy," Caleb Hipple said. "He's somebody who came here and had a lot of vitality... he is somebody who wouldn't put a project down once he's started."