well as any identifying personal effects. Some of these letters were fraudulent, sent by people seeking gold watches, jewelry, or other items as "loot". Fraudulent letters tended to be spotted fairly easily, and were not answered. Wreck investigators were still turning up remains as late as mid-January. A burial service for the unidentified dead was held at Ashtabula's Chestnut Grove Cemetery on January 19, 1877. A mile-long procession conveyed the dead to the cemetery. The railroad purchased a burial plot in which 18 coffins, containing the remains of an estimated 22 people, where placed. Three coffins with three corpses remained at the freight house in the hope that they could still be identified. When these remains went unclaimed, they were buried about a week later in the same plot at Chestnut Grove. Investigation At dawn on December 30, Ashtabula resident Fred W. Blakeslee took photos of the wrecked bridge and train. These provide the most extensive documentation of the wreck known as of 2003. Three investigations were made into the disaster. Conclusions by the coroner's jury There being no coroner in Ashtabula, a coroner's jury of six men from the town was convened by Justice of the Peace Edward W. Richards on December 31. The jury took testimony from 20 railroad officials and employees (including both locomotive engineers and the rear brakeman), nine members of the Ashtabula fire department, 10 residents of Ashtabula, six passengers, and eight civil engineers and bridge builders. The coroner's jury submitted its report on March 8, 1877. The coroner's jury blamed the collapse of the Ashtabula River bridge and the deaths by fire on five factors: The bridge was poorly designed. An all-iron Howe truss was unsuitable for such a long bridge. Some of the members of the chords and braces were not designed to be of sufficient strength, and were poorly placed. The lateral cross-bracing was so underdesigned as to be of little value. The angle blocks had too few and poorly designed lugs, which did not keep the braces and counter-braces from slipping out of place. The bridge was poorly constructed. Each member of the bridge acted independently instead of being positively connected to its neighbors. Some of the vertical posts, braces, and cross-braces were put in the wrong places. To accommodate design changes during the bridge's strengthening, the lugs on the angle blocks and the flanges on the I-beams of the chords