Wedding ring found in mass grave identifies dead Republican

THE Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (AMRH) is dedicated to opening Spanish Civil War mass graves and trying to identify the victims to give some form of closure to their families.

Now after 84 years a wedding ring found in such a grave in Segovia has confirmed that this was the resting place of Eugenio Juan Insúa who was killed in 1936 at the age of 29 along with 16 other Republicans caught in an ambush a few days after the Civil War started.

The Association was formed in 2000 as so many people believed that it was necessary to try to record what happened to more than 100,000 people who went missing and whose fate was never recorded.

In this case, the inscription on the ring 1-6-1931 which coincided with the wedding of Eugenio Insúa and Irene Serrano means that their daughter Rosa María Insúa should (after DNA investigation is completed) be able to inter his remains with her mothers.

The current Spanish Government is passing new legislation to allow state funding to assist in the continued discovery and exhumation of the many remaining mass graves in order to allow families to find final closure by knowing where their relations were buried.

This will also give families the chance to bury the remains of their loved ones where they want rather than where their killers decided.