Mixed burials and commingled human remains recovered from the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Poor Farm Cemetery

Summary

From the mid-1800s to its abandonment in 1974, the MCIG Poor Farm Cemetery in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin served as a burial place for institutional residents, unidentified or unclaimed individuals from the Coroner's Office, and the community poor and indigent. Previous excavations at the cemetery in 1991 and 1992 recovered 1649 individuals in predominantly single interments with an occasional extraneous body part representing incidental amputation or autopsy. The 2013 excavations at the site yielded 650 additional coffin burials, including a significant number of multiple interments unexpected for a historic cemetery of this time. These represent a wide range of burial contexts, including multiple complete individual skeletons as well as body parts likely reflective of autopsy and medical school cadaver use. In addition, many graves contained debris consistent with general refuse disposal and/or medical waste. The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery Project has worked to carefully excavate these commingled burials, to separate the remains, and to return individuality to those whose stories have been lost.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• People that no one had use for, had nothing to give to, no place to offer: The Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Poor Farm Cemetery

Keywords

Spatial Coverage