‘Overlooked’ skeleton identified as 19th century woman. ‘Now she’s got her name back’

While digging up land to install a waterline in 2017, construction workers in Sanford, a small city in southwestern Maine, made a jarring discovery.

“They saw a piece of skull and part of a coffin handle, and then they called the police department immediately,” Paul Auger, a local historian, told McClatchy News.

It turns out they had unearthed a collapsed casket and a partial female skeleton dating to the Victorian era, Auger said.

Their discovery sparked a yearslong effort — involving the scouring of city records and DNA analysis — to identify the woman and piece together the events that led to her death.

Newspaper articles and other records revealed that the local cemetery had been dug up in the early 20th century, according to the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit that Auger enlisted to help identify the woman.

The graves had been slowly transferred to a new cemetery a mile away in order to make room for a school playground. And the last of the remaining graves were relocated to the new cemetery in 1931, or so city officials thought.

“Obviously they didn’t get everyone,” Auger said. “What probably happened is if this (woman) had a stone, it may have been stolen or fallen down and got buried in the dirt.”

Using the woman’s remains, a DNA profile was developed and a team of genetic genealogists was able to construct a family tree using her great-great-nephew and niece.

This led them to identify the individual as Edith Patten, a working-class woman who lived during America’s Gilded Age.

She died of consumption, then a common reference to tuberculosis, at the age of 24 in 1891.

“She probably worked in a shoe factory in Springfield and contracted it that way,” Auger said.

An analysis of her skeleton also revealed fillings in her mouth, indicating she had undergone dental work.

Now that she’s been identified, the city will determine whether her remains will be reinterred in the town cemetery or in Augusta, where the rest of her family is buried, Auger said.

“Every person has a story and a history and hers was almost completely gone from the record,” Auger said. “Now she’s got her name back and her identity back and she’ll have a nice resting place.”

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