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On a windy Saturday afternoon in November, people came to Philadelphia from as far away as Montana, California, and Florida to celebrate their ancestors, whose remains were found at a construction site eight years ago.
The ceremony at Mount Moriah Cemetery in southwest Philadelphia on Nov. 23 marked the end of a long process of recovering, protecting, studying and identifying the human remains. It’s also the start of more research, which could lead to better scientific tools and a better understanding of what life in Philadelphia was like centuries ago.
Kimberlee Moran, a forensic archaeologist at Rutgers University-Camden, helped organize the recovery and research effort, as well as the ceremony.
“The discovery of these remains has offered us an extraordinary opportunity, a chance to listen to the stories that archaeology, science and faith have brought together into the present,” she said to a small group of descendants, researchers and church members at the ceremony.
This began in the 18th century, when the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia was supposed to move their cemetery from Arch Street to Mount Moriah Cemetery.
“They had three months in the middle of winter with 1860s technology to try to dig up thousands of people and relocate them,” Moran explained earlier this year. “Essentially they just did … the best they could with the time that they had and called it a day.”
Some of the human remains were left behind, until construction workers laying the foundation for an apartment building found them in 2016 — more than 150 years later.
Moran and a group of researchers recovered the remains, documented the findings, prevented further damage and did the detective work to find out who the people were.
One of them was Benjamin Britton, an 18th century craftsman and baker who lived through the American Revolutionary War and signed an oath of allegiance to the newly formed United States of America in 1777. Britton was married twice, raised a blended family, owned farmland and slaves, and lived through unpredictable crop yields, inflation and social unrest, recalled Kathy Hartmann, who came from California to Philadelphia for the ceremony. Britton was her sixth great-grandfather.
“Family history is one of my passions and sharing the stories of our ancestors with my brothers, my children and my grandchildren and anyone else who’ll listen brings me great pleasure and satisfaction,” Hartmann told the crowd. “It’s my hope that in sharing a few details of Benjamin Britton’s life with you, we find a sense of kinship and connection and humanity to all those we honor today. Although we are separated from them by many years, we share the familiar challenges of everyday life, seeking to provide for our families and make our own place in the world.”
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