An area off Sparks Street has officially been declared a "burial ground" after the remains of two bodies were discovered last December. They are part of a bigger cemetery that was in use there in the early 1800's. And now the Registrar of Burial Sites is calling for relatives of those long ago deceased to come forward.
The bones were discovered near 62 Sparks Street during excavation to replace some utility lines.
This is one of two burial sites that were discovered in the downtown core in the last couple of years.
The first one, much bigger, involved the remains of 19 people and is currently part of a research project at the Museum of History.
Deep inside the bowels of the Museum of History, Dr. Janet Young is working to uncover the secrets of our ancestors.
“This is the founding population of Ottawa,” says Dr. Young, the curator of physical anthropology, “so it’s has a huge impact as to history of area. It has meaning.”
Inside the Collections Room on the 5th floor of the museum, open only to those who work there, are the remains of 19 people: adults, children and newborns that were discovered along Queen Street a couple of years ago during the construction of the LRT.
Then, in December, the remains of two more people were found just behind the building at 62 Sparks Street.
“Sparks Street and the area around it was Bytown’s oldest cemetery,” says Glen Shackleton, a local historian and the owner of the Haunted Walk of Ottawa.
Archives show a cemetery in the area that was once the corner of Bytown's Barrack Hill, where canal workers and their families were buried.
“Malaria was a problem for canal workers,” says Shackleton, “but life expectancy was pretty rough in the early little timber village as Ottawa was at the time.”
Out of respect, the remains of the humans are kept away from public view but Dr. Young is happy to share some of the artifacts and animal bones founds with those human remains, remnants of lives lived.
“So we have remnants of a shell, small bird legs and pottery,” she says as she holds them in her hands.
Dr. Young's job is to learn about the lives of these people, before they are reinterred, to find out what they ate, how they worked and how they died.
“What the bones show is that these were hard workers,” explains Dr. Young, “their joints are deteriorating, and their spines were used a lot probably from lifting and digging.”
Ontario’s Registrar of Burial Sites has now declared the discovered burial site at 62 Sparks as a “burial ground” and has asked anyone with connections to those buried here to contact the Registrar within two weeks.
The plan is to re-inter all the bodies next year - as part of the city’s 2017 celebrations, finally letting them rest in the city they helped to build.
