Vintage Roman Tombstone Discovered in New Orleans Backyard Left by American Serviceman's Heir

The ancient Roman grave marker recently discovered in a back yard in New Orleans seems to have been inherited and left there by the granddaughter of a military man who served in Italy throughout the global conflict.

Via declarations that practically resolved an global archaeological puzzle, the heir told local media outlets that her grandfather, her grandfather, stored the 1,900-year-old artifact in a showcase at his residence in New Orleans’ Gentilly district prior to his passing in 1986.

The granddaughter recounted she was not sure exactly how Paddock ended up with an item reported missing from an museum in Italy near Rome that lost a large part of its holdings amid World War II attacks. Yet her grandfather was stationed in Italy with the American military throughout the conflict, wed his spouse Adele there, and came home to New Orleans to build a profession as a singing instructor, the descendant explained.

It was fairly common for soldiers who were in Europe in World War II to return with keepsakes.

“I believed it was merely artwork,” O’Brien said. “I was unaware it was a millennia-old … historical object.”

Anyway, what she first believed was a plain marble tablet turned out to be handed down to her after Paddock’s death, and she set it as a garden decoration in the back yard of a residence she bought in the city’s Carrollton district in 2003. O’Brien forgot to take the stone with her when she sold the house in 2018 to a couple who discovered the relic in March while clearing away brush.

The couple – researcher the anthropologist of Tulane University and her husband, Aaron Lorenz – understood the artifact had an inscription in Latin. They sought advice from academics who established the object was a headstone memorializing a around ancient Roman seafarer and soldier named Sextus Congenius Verus.

Additionally, the researchers learned, the tombstone fit the account of one listed as lost from the city museum of the Rome-area town, near where it had originally been found, as an involved researcher – University of New Orleans expert Dr. Gray – explained in a article released online Monday.

The homeowners have since turned the headstone over to the FBI’s art crime team, and plans to send back the relic to the Civitavecchia museum are in progress so that museum can exhibit correctly it.

O’Brien, who resides in the New Orleans community of Metairie suburb, said she thought about her grandpa’s unusual artifact again after the archaeologist’s article had received coverage from the international news media. She said she reached out to a news outlet after a discussion from her former spouse, who told her that he had seen a article about the object that her grandpa had once had – and that it in fact proved to be a piece from one of the history’s renowned empires.

“We were in shock about it,” the granddaughter expressed. “It’s astonishing how this all happened.”

Dr. Gray, for his part, said it was a relief to learn how Congenius Verus’s headstone made its way behind a residence more than thousands of miles away from its original location.

“I was really thinking we’d have our list of possible people through whom it could have ended up here,” Gray said. “I didn’t anticipate discovering the exact heir – making it exhilarating to uncover the truth.”