Digging up history at Barrack Hill
“If you are burying your relatives, then (families) are going to reuse the clothes and they’ll pass them down to somebody else,” Mortimer says.
To move the remains, Young’s onsite crew sifted thousands of bones, including many fragments, which were measured, photographed and transported to the museum at the end of each day.
“They were put in paper bags, because some of them were quite damp — you don’t use plastic because that would hold the moisture in and the bone would disintegrate — and then all those bags are loaded into banker’s boxes.”
Remains of the children were more delicate and required a gentler touch. In most cases, they were “block lifted” with the surrounding soil and brought back to the lab at the museum to be “excavated under controlled conditions.”
Women averaged between five feet and five feet, four inches tall, and men were between fivefoot-five and five-foot-10. Most of the adults showed signs “that they had gone through periods of physiological stress when they were children,” says Young, who says such signs were evident in the adults’ weak tooth enamel. Worn joints also showed a “hard life,” for those likely working as labourers in lumber trade or possibly constructing the Rideau Canal, which was supervised by English military engineer Lt.-Col. John By.
The cemetery was also in use during two cholera epidemics, which, Young says, may have wiped out entire families due to poor sanitation and drinking water, as well as a lack of proper medical care.
The cemetery served various denominations, including Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian. And from Young’s analysis, most of the remains were likely of Irish, Scottish, French and British background.
Given that there was no master list, the kind that a modern-day cemetery would have, the city cannot identify who was assigned to each plot. While there is a list of names from parish records of people who were buried there, it’s not clear who has been removed.
During the public visitation, the Victorian-style closed caskets will be on display. Each casket will have a brass plaque, hand-stamped, that will key the remains back to the archeological profile documented for that person.
That’s to make sure that future generations will have a chance to treat the remains with respect, and to potentially identify the dead, at some point.
“If, at a future time, we are able to find additional details with respect to those remains and who they are — because we don’t know the names of any of the individuals — that at a future time we will be able to specifically identify specific individuals and then that information would be keyed to where they are,” Young says.