After a century in a nameless grave, a daughter of Enoch finally got her name

More than a century after her death, a young Inuk girl named Sara Abraha Uvloriak, who was buried in a cemetery in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, received a new memorial ceremony and gravestone. Unlike her original gravestone, which simply read "An Eskimo Child," her new stone bears her full name: Sara Abraha Uvloriak.
Ken Harper, a historian and researcher who spent many years in the North Pole region and wrote about Indigenous peoples, was in England several years ago, conducting research on a turn-of-the-century tour in which a promoter had brought Indigenous people across Europe and Africa for an exhibition. The 1899 tour included a group of about 30 people, including Sara, her parents, and four siblings, who were Inuit from the Hebron Labrador Mission Station. Such tours often involved challenging travels, and Sara passed away at the age of four in London. Two of her siblings also passed away shortly after her.
Her death was documented in the Moravian Church archives, where Harper found his full name in November 2009 and was sent to Chelsea to search for her grave, which turned out to be a marker that simply said "An Eskimo Child" and mistakenly listed a roster of graves. The year of her death is 1900. Harper said, "It was just a very moving experience to stand by the grave of someone whose story you know a little bit about and see her grave with no name."
Lorin Parsons, the archivist for the Moravian Church, mentioned that at the time of Sara's burial, there was no record of placing a gravestone. It wasn't until the 1970s when a group was cleaning up the overgrown burial site that previously unknown graves, including Sara's, were discovered. Parsons stated that this stone is relatively modern and about 50 years old. Parsons said, "We think it might have been replaced at that time." "We can only assume that they didn't check the records back then to figure out who the actual marker was for, so there's a bit of a mystery remaining."
Harper wrote an article about Sara's story and her century-old gravestone, which was published in 2015 by the magazine "Labrador Them Days." The article was later revisited in 2019 by "Nunatsiaq News," a newspaper covering Nunavut and the Nunavik region in Quebec, at which point the congregation of the Fitler Lane Moravian Church, the caretakers of the cemetery, became aware of Sara's story and decided to take action.

 News Sources