Skeletal Remains Found In Connecticut Tree Upended Superstorm Sandy

A death investigator and a forensic anthropologist exhume a skeleton unearthed in Connecticut by Superstorm Sandy. (c) Melissa Bailey Photo, New Haven Independent

Update: 

As the dig continued, a Yale University anthropologist and state death investigator discovered facial bones from two people, reports the New Haven Independent, which broke the story Tuesday. On Wednesday, the sleuths, joined by a state archaeologist, found a "hand-wrought iron coffin nail from the 18th century," suggesting burial in the 1700s.

Assistant Police Chief Archie Generoso said, after consulting with the scientists, the bones likely date from the late 1700s, the Independent says, pointing to a theory that the bones were of victims of a smallpox epidemic between 1775-82.

A centuries-old skeleton was unearthed when a 100-year-old oak tree on the Upper Green in New Haven, Connecticut, was felled by Superstorm Sandy. The local paper is playing it as a Halloween/spooky thing, but all I can think of are genealogists who would love to know if this is an ancestor. The skeleton, entwined in the tree's massive root system, is believed to be from the late 17th or early 18th century.

The original burial ground for New Haven residents for the first 150 years of the settlement, the Upper Green served many purposes. Burials there were discontinued by 1821 when the headstones were moved to the Grove Street Cemetery. Between 5,000 to 10,000 bodies remained and additional soil was added to level the Green. According to Wikipedia, those believed to still be resting in the Upper Green include Benedict Arnold's first wife, Reverend James Pierpont (founder of Yale University), members of President Rutherford B. Hayes' family, and Theophilus Eaton, one of the founders of New Haven and the church and governor of the New Haven Colony for 19 years.  

Let's hope they do a DNA profile!

Tombstone Tuesday: Search Arlington National Cemetery on the Web

The Associated Press reports:

Arlington National Cemetery on Monday made available to the public a massive electronic database detailing the gravesites of the roughly 400,000 people buried there.

Cemetery officials built the database over the last two years to verify the accuracy of their records brought into question by reports of misidentified graves. Prior to 2010, the cemetery used paper records and maps to track who is buried where.

On Monday at the Association of the United States Army convention in Washington, the cemetery debuted an interactive map available through its website and through a free smartphone app. It uses geospatial technology to hone in on specific graves and can also be searched by name.

The database has been the subject of a painstaking review and even now is not 100 percent complete. Katharine Kelley, the cemetery's director of accountability, said that about 99.4 percent of the nearly 260,000 gravesites, niches and markers have been verified.

The remaining few deal largely with some of the cemetery's oldest graves and records, which date to the Civil War. In many cases, it may be an effort to verify the spelling of the first name of a spouse buried at the cemetery among disparate handwritten records.

You can search here by name, birth date, death date, and/or location on the website. An iPhone or Android app is available for download here.

Search results include the name of the person who was buried and the dates of their birth and death. Photos of the front and back of the headstone can also be viewed. Monuments and memorials that commemorate the service of specific military units are also included in the database.

Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France

NORMANDY AMERICAN CEMETERY AND MEMORIAL, 6 Oct 2012

Jet Lag

Europe may never be the same, but Sassy Jane will be back once she knows what time zone she's in. See you soon!

How Future Generations Will Remember Us

Courtesy ShoeboxBlog.com

Tuesday's Tip: Share Your Research with The Genealogy Center at Allen County Public Library

One of the country's premier genealogy collections – The Genealogy Center at Allen County Indiana Public Library – is soliciting donations of your genealogy research.

The Fort Wayne, Indiana, library has a great Web site offering the following info:

[An] immediate way to support the work of The Genealogy Center is to share your research. We welcome your contributions of papers, books, and disks of data. In print or in digital formats, your work will not only benefit great numbers of researchers, it will also be preserved for generations to come on our shelves and webpages. Whether it’s research articles, images of military veterans in your family history, completed books, indices to record groups large and small, or copies of the family record pages in your family Bible, all will find a good home in The Genealogy Center.  Contributions can be mailed or sent electronically directly to The Genealogy Center.

Visit their website for more information on collection policies:

http://www.genealogycenter.org/Donate.aspx

If you do contribute your research, I think it would also be a wonderful gesture to make a monetary donation at the same time. We all know how hard pressed libraries of every kind are these days and what The Genealogy Center is doing by collecting our work is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Click here to make an online monetary gift to the Allen County Public Library Foundation via their secure web site. Be sure to specific your gift for the Genealogy Endowment Fund.

Follow Friday: Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin

Today's Follow Friday is the Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin, which has a great collection of German parish registers from the former Prussian  church  provinces  beyond the Oder-Neisse border (Eastern Prussia, Western Prussia, Back  Pomerania, Posen, eastern  territories of Mark Brandenburg and Silesia) and some

Protestant  military  church  registers. 

The repository has the following holdings:

• About 7000 Parish Registers from Protestant parishes which belonged to the former eastern provinces of the Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union. These areas today belong to Poland, Russia, and  Lithuania. German  Protestant  parishes no longer exist in these areas.
• About 763  military church records of the Military Church
• About 70 Parish Registers  from  German-speaking  congregations  outside of  Germany.
• Personal records from Danish refugee camps (1943-1949) are available for official use only.

Click here to search for parish registers by village. The fee schedule for genealogical research is provided here. And here is a link to the search interface (with English translation by Google). 

If you're looking for parish registers for this region that aren't available through FamilySearch or LDS microfilm, the EZA Archive may be just the ticket.

Tuesday's Tip: Updates to Chronicling America

There are now 5,206,652 pages of newspapers available at Chronicling America. Not familiar with this free site sponsored by the Library of Congress and NEH? Visit the site at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

You can search and download pages from selected American newspapers across the country from 1836-1922. To see a list of the digitized newspapers and enter search terms, visit at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers.

The site also offers the U.S. Newspaper Directory, supplying information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. You can identify what titles exist for a specific place and time, and how to access them at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles. Newspaper titles currently listed: 151,814.  

New titles and images are added regularly so visit often.