In the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Sunday, January 20, 2002. Lower half of the Metro page with a color picture including Norman Sullivan, anthro prof at Marquette University and a plot map. Article by John Fauber. [ Edited and rewritten ] Approximately 1000 adults and 600 children have been removed from shallow graves at the Milwaukee County grounds in Wauwatosa since 1992. The burials were of residents at county facilities including the Alms House or Poor Farm, various orphanages, the insane asylum and the tuberculosis sanatorium, from the coroner's office, and from families too poor to afford burials. Some were Civil War veterans with amputated limbs, others laborers who became too debilitated to continue to earn a living. "Although the dead were not the illustrious political and business figures who made Milwaukee famous, they were just as important in shaping the community, Sullivan said." Water retention/sewage detention ponds necessary to control flooding led to the removal of the remains, although newspaper accounts even in the 20's published complaints of the poor condition of these graves and of the several cemetery sites. Among the bodies, a 5 year old dead of syphilis, a 6 year old dead of rickets, possibly from a lack of sunlight, and a lousy diet, a man in his 40's showing physical signs of mental retardation who may have spent most of his life chained to a wall. The anthropologist suggests that many of the children would have been born to unwed mothers or to families unable to care for them and died of "failure to thrive syndrome" between the ages of 3 and 6 months. "Eventually the names of the dead and information about them will be part of a publicly available database now being put together by Patricia Richards, associate scientist in the department of anthropology at UWM [ University of Wisconsin Milwaukee ]." The full article appears in the Journal-Sentinel's on-line archive at: http://www.jsonline.com/news/Metro/jan02/14236.asp If the hot link doesn't work and you need to search the archive, type in Sullivan and the correct article should be the first in the search return. For your information, Ashley --