The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Skeletons found at Yale hospital site tell story of immigrants
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 midnineteenth century New Haven.
The bones were discovered in 2011, when a construction crew working on renovations at the hospital’s emergency room on York Street 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 thenstate archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni, Yale biological anthropologist Gary Aronsen and students excavated the four skeletons, 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 1970sera 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 AngloSaxon names, according to church records,
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.”