As an anthropologist begins her study of the human bones unearthed recently in Yorkville, historians are trying to figure out how many more bodies might still be buried in the area where the remains were found.
The skeletal human remains were found on May 15 by a construction crew working to repair water pipes in the 200 block of Park Street, law enforcement officials said. Members of the Kendall County Historical Society helped law enforcement figure out that a cemetery called the Bristol Burying Grounds used to sit on that spot, which dated the remains which were found recently to the mid-1800s, officials said.
After several days of searching and digging through excavated dirt by officials from the Kendall County Coroner’s Office, the Yorkville Police Department and the Illinois State Police Crime Scene Services Section, the remains were sent to Loyola University in Chicago for analysis.
Anne Grauer, a professor of biological anthropology at Loyola University and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Paleopathology, has received the remains and will now be piecing them together to see if the bones make up only a single person or if they have come from multiple people, she said in an interview last Thursday.
Grauer said she joined law enforcement officials in uncovering the remains during the final two days of the project in Yorkville, and from what she saw during that time, it is likely that the remains make up only a single person.
To confirm her theory, she will be cleaning then cataloging each bone to check for duplicates. As further testing, she will also try to match adjoining bones to see if they fit together.
After cataloging the bones, Grauer will be analyzing the remains to determine the person’s approximate year of death, biological sex and any medical conditions the person had in life that may help historians identify them, she said.
Once complete, her analysis will be compiled in a report to the Kendall County Coroner’s Office.
Hinges found alongside the bones could also help historians date the person’s year of death, according to Grauer. While she will not be studying the artifacts, she said these hinges may have come from the coffin the person was buried in, and the hinges can be matched to ones sold in yearly catalogs back in the 19th century.
The Kendall County Historical Society is currently working to find more information about the people laid to rest in the Bristol Burying Grounds using historical records from churches that used to be located nearby, old municipal records and tombstones that were relocated to Elmwood Cemetery, members told The Beacon-News recently.
Informal reports indicate that a total of 16 tombstones from the Bristol Burying Grounds were moved to Elmwood Cemetery sometime during the 1980s and 1990s, according to Lisa Wolancevich, Kendall County Historical Society’s special projects director. However, she said there are no official records of the tombstones being moved.
Between May 15 and 17, law enforcement officials worked to remove human remains from dirt excavated by crews working to repair water lines in Yorkville. (Lisa Wolancevich)
Wolancevich and others at the Kendall County Historical Society said they believe that the bodies were not moved along with their tombstones.
The Bristol Burying Grounds was desecrated instead of properly being taken apart, and informal reports indicate that those who moved the tombstones to their current resting place at Elmwood Cemetery found the stones all half-buried in a pile, Wolancevich said.
The tombstones were also placed extremely close together at Elmwood Cemetery, which Wolancevich said likely means there are no bodies buried beneath them. Plus, the informal reports from those who found and moved the stones make no mention of them also moving the bodies, she said.
Tombstones that used to sit in the Bristol Burying Grounds now rest at the edge of Elmwood Cemetery in Yorkville. Members of the Kendall County Historical Society say these stones seem too close together to have bodies buried underneath them. (R. Christian Smith / The Beacon-News)
When asked if she believes other bodies may still be buried in the area where the remains were found recently, Grauer said there is always a chance.
“I help with the excavation and recovery of historic cemeteries relatively frequently. It’s something I’ve done for decades in my career,” she said. “Even at times where local authorities might think that there are no more bodies that are at a particular site that was a historic cemetery, I usually will laugh and say, ‘Well, there’s about 150% chance that there’s still human remains there.’”
In fact, other bodies have likely already been discovered at the old Bristol Burying Grounds site. According to a December 1963 report by the Kendall County Record, construction crews digging to do sewer work on Park Street found the skeletal remains of two people.
The report said that the remains were sent to Elmwood Cemetery, but Wolancevich said she is still working to confirm that. She has records from the cemetery, but from her initial study, they do not seem to contain any information about bodies from Bristol Burying Grounds, she said.
Construction crews finding skeletal remains when digging is a relatively common occurrence, according to Grauer. She said cemeteries used to be placed in prominent or central locations of communities, especially small towns, and as that land changed hands and uses, tombstones or markers often got removed without their accompanying bodies.
The Kendall County Historical Society is working to figure out exactly when development took over the Bristol Burying Grounds, Wolancevich said.
The cemetery stopped appearing on town maps in the late 1870s, which she said means it likely stopped being used around that time, but development might not have taken place on the site until the 1900s.
Wolancevich also founded and currently chairs the Yorkville Historic Preservation Society, and said she is hoping to work with that organization’s board to place a plaque in the area of the old cemetery explaining its history.
“I think that would be a good tribute to these people, because we might never find out how many people are there,” she said. “I think we owe those people.”
After the Kendall County Historical Society finishes all of its research on the Bristol Burying Grounds, its members plan to look for the descendants of those who were buried there, Wolancevich said.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
