 Secrets of Spanish Florida. Uncover stories of America's past that never made it into the textbooks. WJCT is proud to feature additional local stories from Florida's history. Well, we're at Ptolemato Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida. Ptolemato actually began as an Indian mission sometime in the early 1700s. Then it actually became a cemetery, purely cemetery use in 1777 when the Minorkans arrived. Of course, the Minorkans had been brought here by Dr. William Turnbull to New Smyrna Beach in 1769. They were theoretically indentured servants, but they were actually treated as slaves, and they finally rebelled. So they rebelled and came up here, and the governor at the time, the British governor, Governor Patrick Tonin, gave them permission to come into the city. They'd come with their priest, Father Pedro Camps. They lived actually mostly in this part of town. Father Camps went to them and asked for permission to use this as a cemetery. So then it became a cemetery. Basically, the cemetery was used by the Minorkans, and then when the Spanish came back for the second Spanish period in 1784, then it became the parish cemetery for the parish that is now the Cathedral Basilica. There are about a thousand people buried here. There's only 105 markers, though, and this is partly because a lot of the markers, the original ones, were wood. There is no order in this cemetery. There are no numbered plots. There's nothing like that. And all of our information comes from the parish records. The Minorkans probably constitute the largest single group, and I would say probably at least two-thirds or so of people here are not the original Minorkans, but Minorkans are people of Minorkan descent. We think of this cemetery as sort of a concentration and at the same time a cross-section of our history. The people buried here come from all over. People who fought on either side, both sides of the Civil War buried here. We have some of the freedmen who were the African-American soldiers. We have, of course, lots of Minorkans, and a lot of times the names you will see are the same. Anything that happened in St. Augustine has left its record here in some way or another.