Ames Manufacturing Company has its origins in blacksmith and founder, Captain John Ames, who in 1774, made some of the first manufactured shovels in what would emerge as the new, United States of America.
During the next couple of years, using shovels, pick-axes, and explosives, they retrieved a six-meter skeleton of Terminonaris Robustus but everyone called it "Big Bert".
The dead bodies of the Sinti were – according to consistent testimonies of contemporary witnesses – for the time being deposited between shovels and pots in the gravedigger’s cell at the cemetery Haigermoos, and then buried during the night – without discernible gravesite.