Editor's Note: Normally, recurring articles in our Newsletter, such as the "President's Letter" and "News from the Office of State Archaeology" are not reprinted here, they being primarily updates of current and ongoing activities of the Friends organization.

An exception is being made in this case, however, due to the extensive local news coverage associated with the uncovering of skeletal remains at a hospital consturction site in New Haven. Nick's article gives readers a good insight into what can happen when such findings are so unexpectedly made.


An old adage states that you never know what will happen when the phone rings. I suppose that in today's parlance that can be said of cell phones, texting, email, etc. As most of you know I am being dragged kicking into the 21st Century!

However, when the phone rang in July, it was the New Haven Police Department alerting me that skeletal remains had been recovered from construction activity at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Upon our arrival at the hospital, we encountered the skeletal remains of two individuals eroding out of a sandy soil horizon under a cement bridge. The cement barrier had been constructed in the 1970s when the hospital was originally built. Unwittingly, they poured the cement immediately over the historic burials and hence protected them from damage and preserved them until this summer.

Assisted by UConn mentorship students and Yale University, we began excavations wearing hard hats in the middle of construction activity around us. The burials were laid out on their backs, in an east-west orientation, facing the east, which is a classic Christian mortuary practice, and each of the remains was accompanied by sets of hardware nails indicating they were buried in wooden coffins which have long decomposed.

Our surprise came when we started to excavate one of the burials: another set of skeletal remains began to show up immediately under it. We realized that we had two individuals, stacked within the same burial shaft. As we continued excavations, a third individual was revealed underneath the two previously recorded. Three individuals stacked in one grave!

Field work was accompanied by historic research, and before long we realized we were at the site of a former Catholic Church. In fact, Christ's Church was the first Roman Catholic Church in New Haven, built in 1834. This church was wooden and it burned to the ground in 1848. Subsequently, St. John Evangelical was constructed on the site of the former church just prior to the Civil War. Christ's Church had a cemetery on the side of the church and as many as 400 people may have been buried there between 1834 and 1851. Tombstones had been removed in the later part of the 19th century, and by the 20th century, memory of the burying ground had been lost. That is, until the skeletal remains were uncovered in July.

With recognition of a Catholic cemetery, we began to work with representatives of the Catholic Church who came to the site, blessed the remains in place, and purified the area. We will continue to work with the Church hierarchy for an appropriate reburial at a future date.

Meanwhile, we are continuing historic research, including New Haven Vital Records, early city maps, and church documents. Yale University is conducting the forensic investigation of the remains. We are hoping to identify these individuals based on burial and church records and forensic testing, including DNA. In particular, we are interested in determining if the three stacked individuals are of the same family, or unrelated to each other. Unfortunately, due to the police investigation and construction site security, we were unable to notify FOSA membership for assistance and had to keep the field crew to a minimum. However, we will keep you posted as the research continues into this most interesting case.