Ontario man finally laid to rest after ashes went unclaimed in U.S. for nearly 40 years

After his ashes went unclaimed in New York state for nearly 40 years, an Ontario man was finally laid to rest alongside his wife and son on Friday.

Freeman Barber was born in 1883, grew up on a farm near Guelph and died in 1967 in Canandaigua, in upstate New York, where he had moved with his family in the 1930s.

Somehow, his ashes ended up in a warehouse at an RV dealership, where the owner found them while cleaning in 1979.

She called the local sheriff, Murray Henry, who decided to keep them at his home in the hope that one day he would find family members who might want them back.

"Now I have live human beings who are part of Freeman's story," Henry, now retired, told CBC News Friday at Avondale Cemetary in Stratford, Ont. He had kept the ashes in an office in his home since receiving that call nearly 40 years ago..

Henry drove up from New York to Stratford for a service to finally bury Barber's ashes alongside his wife and young son. Freeman Barber's name was on one of the family's stones, but his relatives were unaware that his remains were not there.

"I didn't know he wasn't buried there," said great-nephew Laurie Barber. The dates were there, but he wasn't."

For decades, a box with an urn containing Freeman Barber's ashes sat on Henry's desk. As he wrote his thesis and worked to become a deacon in the Catholic Church, Henry would often talk to Barber as though he was in the room.

"I can remember on more than one occasion sitting back at the desk and saying, 'Freeman, I don't have the faintest idea what this book is trying to tell me.' He was just always there," Henry told CBC News earlier this week. "Sometimes you just find yourself just saying, 'Excuse me, Freeman, I have to dust.'" 

Many times he thought about scattering Barber's ashes. He had tried numerous times to find Barber's family, using the name and date of birth he found inside the box with the urn.

"I knew that somewhere there was a family that had somehow lost possession of a loved one," he said this week.

"But this was before the internet and it just kept coming up with dead ends."

But in March, his wife, Susan, found Barber's name on a geneology website.

"The whole family tree popped up," Susan Henry told CBC on Friday. "Murray was in the other room and I said, 'Murray, I hit the jackpot on Freeman.'"

The site showed a picture of him and his extended family at his parents' 50th wedding anniversary in May 1927. Susan Henry used the family connections available on the website to find one of Barber's living relatives — Laurie Barber, a retired pastor living in Toronto.

Barber wrote back to confirm he is Freeman Barber's great-nephew and, many telephone calls and emails later, Freeman Barber has been reunited with his family 49 years after his death.

"Freeman has been a part of our home for these many years," Henry said Friday. "But someone asked me if you're going to miss having him in your home. And I'm not. I'm so pleased."

Knowing that there is now an empty space in Henry's house, Barber's family is sending him home with one of the spurs that Barber received after he enlisted in the Canadian Mounted Rifles in 1902.

While both families are happy to see Freeman Barber in his rightful final resting place, one question remains: how his ashes ended up in an RV dealer's warehouse. Barber's daughter, Audrey, and her husband did have an RV business at one time, the only real connection between an RV dealer's warehouse and the family.

"How did Freeman Barber end up on a shelf in a warehouse in an RV store is part of the story we'll never know," Henry said.

• Ontario man's ashes, unclaimed in U.S. for nearly 40 years, finally coming home