Skeletons found at New Haven site tell immigrants’ story
Four skeletons found at a Yale New Haven Hospital construction site in 2011 likely belonged to early members of the city’s Catholic community, and one may have been a convicted murderer who killed an elderly New Haven couple in 1849.
In a paper published in the journal PLOS One, scientists and historians from eight institutions, including Yale, Quinnipiac, University of Connecticut and Central Connecticut State University, write that the bodies tell a complex story of immigrant and Catholic identities in mid-nineteenth century New Haven.
The bones were discovered in 2011, when a construction crew working on renovations at the hospital’s Emergency Room returned after a weekend and found a human bone in a newly dug trench. Four skeletons were excavated: two adult males, and two adult females, referred to as the “YNH 4.”
The land beneath the hospital was home to the the city’s first Catholic Church, Christ Church, which opened in 1834, and the skeletons were buried in the adjacent Catholic cemetery, alongside more than 600 others. The church’s name later changed, and between 1869 and 1898, the tombstones and markers were moved, the researchers wrote in the paper. “Awareness of the cemetery, (now missing all headstones) seemed to disappear,” they wrote.
After the first bone was discovered, work on the project halted while then-state archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni, Yale biological anthropologist Gary Aronsen and several students excavated the four skeletons uncovered by the construction, and began studying them with a team that included local historians, anthropologists and experts in radiology and isotopes from Germany, Florida, Oklahoma and Connecticut.
They determined that the four skeletons belonged to four people between the ages of 35 and 60. Three of the skeletons were largely complete, stacked on top of each other in the same grave shaft, while the fourth was only able to excavated from about the waist up. The remainder of her body “was not present due to the pouring of a concrete pillar as part of 1970s-era YNNH renovations.”
While researchers expected that they would all be of Irish origin, as Christ Church’s cemetery was predominantly Irish Catholic, DNA evidence showed that three of the people were instead of Central and Southern European descent, a “relatively uncommon” population in the city at the time, they wrote in a summary of the paper.
“When the DNA came back, that really threw us for a loop,” Bellantoni said.
Small numbers of Prussian, Polish, German and Italian immigrants are documented in New Haven historical records at that time, they wrote, but “represented a small fraction of the population.”
That the three bodies were buried in the Christ Church cemetery, surrounded by people with mainly Irish, Gaelic or Anglo-Saxon names, according to church records, shows the significance of their shared Catholic faith, the researchers wrote.
That indicates “that their faith was a far more important unifier than their language or nationality at this early period,” Aronsen said.
Researchers also gained insight into their daily lives from their bones and teeth, which “carry the scars or the indicators of some aspects of your individual life history,” he said.
Notches on their teeth told researchers they bit down on ceramic pipes, and residue on their teeth indicated tobacco staining.
The skeletons have “multiple marks of heavy labor, of physical activity.”
The two male skeletons show signs of working manual labor, while the two women “may have been employed in the garment industry or some other repetitive labor regime,” based on their joints and other characteristics, the paper said. All four “exhibit skeletal markers of stress, disease, trauma and occupation,” they wrote.
“It really brings home vividly the hardship, the difficulty of life back then,” Bellantoni said. “You could see the stress on their bodies... lives were short and painful.”
Clues to the identity of the fourth skeleton also lay in his bones: a male with fractured neck vertebrae. By reviewing burial records and listed causes of death, researchers determined it may be the body of James McCaffrey, an Irish immigrant hanged in 1850 after he was convicted of murder.
McCaffrey, who came to the U.S. around 1830 as a teen, worked in places including Quebec, New Orleans, and upstate New York before coming to New Haven, they wrote.
“While in New Haven in October 1849, he reportedly visited a couple (Ann and Charles Smith) who owned an inn and a bowling alley at the top of East Rock,” the researchers wrote. “Shortly after his visit, the Smiths were found dead, shot and bludgeoned to death respectively.”
McCaffrey fled to Canada, but was captured, then tried and found guilty in Ann Smith’s death. On Oct. 2, 1850, he and another convicted murderer were executed behind the New Haven courthouse. He was buried in a pine wood box at Christ Church later that day.
Researchers said they can “provisionally identify” the fourth skeleton as McCaffrey, but can’t conclusively determine it was him. While he is the only person buried in the cemetery whose records indicated he died by judicial hanging, “other Christ Church males have unspecified trauma as cause of death,” which could also refer to the fractures found in the fourth skeleton.
Aronsen pointed to the interdisciplinary team working on the project as its “most essential component,” because experts from multiple fields “were able to being a piece of the puzzle or a line of evidence that is their skill set,” he said. “We were able to assemble a far more comprehensive history, not just for the four skeletons but the community they came from.”
The ‘forgotten’ cemetery
The cemetery where the YNH 4 were buried had been largely forgotten after the gravestones were moved, and as the church changed names and hands over time.
When the church was sold to Yale University in 1969, and during the subsequent construction for expansions to Yale New Haven Hospital, “there are no references to a cemetery in any available real estate transactions,” the researchers wrote. The church, by then long known as St. John’s, was demolished, and the space was used first for parking before the hospital expanded.
Moving tombstones and grave markers wasn’t uncommon, Bellantoni said. Urban expansion has fueled movement of graves around Connecticut, including at sites in New London, Hartford and Danbury he said, and families sometimes moved the markers but left the remains behind. The same happened at the burial ground that now lies beneath the New Haven Green: the gravestones were moved to the Grove Street Cemetery, leaving behind “literally hundreds of burials,” Bellantoni said.
Local historians Anthony Griego and Howard Eckels, a retired state trooper who researched the cemetery before his death in 2012, have said the stones were removed at the direction of a priest, who didn’t like the way they looked on the property. Two successive priests unsuccessfully tried to move them before a third finally succeeded; he told parishioners they were moved to St. Bernard’s, though only about 70 have been located there.
In 1979, two skulls were found that were believed to be from the burial ground; both were found in material that had been excavated from the former church site, and was dumped behind an auto body shop. A police detective told the New Haven Register at the time that it was “pretty conclusive” that they were remains of people buried in the church cemetery, but further excavation was not done.
Griego, a former New Haven Police Officer, learned about the church and the cemetery in a book he bought for a dollar from a friend, which identified the location of the city’s first Catholic institution. When he began working as a security guard at Yale New Haven Hospital in 2001, after retiring from the city police force, he repeatedly told people about the forgotten cemetery below their feet, he said. He believes that “somebody knew” about the bodies, especially during earlier phases of construction, but that nothing was done about it.
The YNH 4’s bodies will be returned to St. Mary’s Church, where a formal Mass and burial ceremony will be held this spring. While they could have been kept for future study, using new technology as it becomes available in coming years, “it comes down to respect for the remains themselves,” Bellantoni said. “It’s time now... to see that they are properly buried, with a Catholic ceremony.”