In 1944, Helen Geneva (Carter) Barnes committed suicide. Eighty-one years later, her great-grandson is searching for her remains.

Helen Carter was born in Oklahoma in 1907 or 1908 – depending on what records are consulted– to coal miner James/John Elmer Carter and Nora McPherson. The couple also had a daughter Devern, born in 1909. By 1910, the family had relocated to Colorado.

Around the age of 17 in 1924, Helen married 27-year-old Karl Payne Pfau, a stenographer for Texas Company. Their daughter, Garnet Mildred Pfau, was born in1925 in Houston. Two years later, Helen’s mother passed away at the age of 37, apparently followed by 19-year-old Devern in 1928. 

On March 11, 1930, Helen and Karl were divorced in Texas. Two months later, on May 7, Helen married 27-year-old Everett Donnellay Barnes in Louisiana. By 1933, Helen was living with her husband and child in Hartford, Conn. By 1936, they were residing in Newton, Mass. and, by 1937 were in Boston. Everett was the district manager of the Monroe Calculating Machine Company in Providence. Within the next three years, the family moved to 70 President Avenue in Providence.

Sometime prior to the summer of 1944, Helen and Everett were divorced. Helen moved with her daughter Garnet to 171 Elmgrove Avenue in Providence. For reasons which have become lost to time, Helen was in Manhattan on Aug. 10, 1944. That afternoon, at 1:30, a doctor pronounced her dead at The Manor, a ten-story, 215-apartment brick and terracotta structure modeled after Sutton Place in Surrey, England. The apartment building, which opened for business in 1927, was a lavish operation containing several penthouses, each with a roof terrace. There in the comfortable surroundings, Helen had committed suicide through the use of illuminating gas – gas used to produce indoor and outdoor lighting.

Seventeen-year-old Garnet reported her mother’s death to authorities although it isn’t known if she was the one who discovered the terrible scene. As Helen’s next of kin, the teenager was legally responsible for making decisions concerning the remains. It appears that at some point, Garnet’s former stepfather served the role of her legal guardian when it came to her inheritance of her mother’s estate.

Helen’s body was transported to Fresh Pond Crematory & Columbarium, a massive three-story structure in New York holding thousands of urns containing cremated remains. Helen’s ashes were not to remain there, however. After her cremation on Aug. 14, her ashes were picked up by an agent from W.B. Cooke, Inc., a funeral parlor on Roosevelt Avenue in New York.

Garnet returned to Providence where she married 20-year-old Donald Cushing Robbins four months later, on Dec. 15, 1944. Five years passed and while Garnet and Donald were residing on Angell Street, they welcomed a daughter, Lynda.  “My mother said that Garnet only spoke of her mother’s death one time,” Steven Harrison said during a recent interview. “And that it was very off-the-cuff like ‘Well, my mother committed suicide.’ For that generation, suicide was such a taboo. It was never spoken of.”

Garnet eventually returned to Texas where she died and was buried in 2001. Subsequently, when Steven decided to begin tracing his family history, he was met with a host of mysteries. Acknowledging that Helen’s reasons for being in New York and taking her own life are probably forever lost to history, his present concern is whether or not she is resting in peace. While in the process of ancestral research, he came across an entry on the web site “Find A Grave,” stating that Helen’s ashes are interred at Roger Williams Mausoleum in Cranston.

The private mausoleum, on Cyr Street, opened its doors in 1926. Building contractor Thomas Francis Cullinan designed the three-story stone building with compartmented walls in which to hold caskets and cremated remains. When Cullinan died 1938, care of the mausoleum was inherited by his two daughters, one of whom died in 2000 and the other in 2002. No provisions had been made for the future care of the mausoleum. As the structure crumbled, it was entered by wild animals, looters and vandals. In 2005, the city of Cranston condemned the mausoleum as a dangerous and unsafe structure. It was locked, fenced off and posted with no trespassing signs. Although the mausoleum’s official records no longer exist, it is estimated that the remains of over 500 individuals are contained inside.

The funeral parlor which handled Helen’s remains is no longer in business. Harrison’s attempts to contact someone at “Find A Grave” to ask how they obtained his great-grandmother’s name as someone interred in the mausoleum have been unsuccessful. “Whoever added that information was looking at something,” he said, desperate to know what that something was as he can find no evidence of Helen’s final resting place at all. Attempts to contact someone officiated with the mausoleum have also been unsuccessful for Harrison who stated, “If she’s there, I can’t leave her there. It’s on my conscience every day.” A resident of Texas, Harrison said he would gladly come to Rhode Island to recover his great-grandmother, if she is indeed here in the destroyed mausoleum. “If we could find her remains, than I would at least have some closure,” he said.