After a decade, the remains of seven enslaved adults and seven children have been honored and reburied in New York after being found in plain coffins in 2005.
According to a news report by Albany’s WNYT, the 14 had been buried at St. Agnes cemetery in Menands, New York mid-June.
In the summer of 2005, construction workers were installing a sewer line in Menands when they discovered the remains of 14 bodies buried in plain coffins.
The 14 are believed to have been owned by New York’s infamous Schuyler family in the 1700s. After being discovered, they were kept at the New York State Museum for a little over a decade.
Over that time period, Lisa Anderson, Curator of Bioarchaeology at the New York State Museum, used the remains to build facial reconstructions, determine living conditions and examine DNA.
“The adults, a number of them were of African ancestry, but also two of the women were of Madagascar maternal ancestry,” Anderson said. “All of them worked fairly hard throughout their entire lives. So they…even they youngest woman had signs of arthritis.”
