New burial site for 727 souls will be blessed I-279 excavation and archaeological tests finally over Tuesday, October 28, 2003 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic At 10 o'clock this morning, in an old Swiss-German cemetery at the edge of a plateau overlooking the Allegheny River, the remains of 727 people will be recommitted to the earth. It has been well over a century since their bodies were buried, 16 years since they were discovered under a North Side church parking lot, a year since they were reinterred at Troy Hill's Voegtly Cemetery. Since 1987, they have traveled from their not-so-final resting place to the GAI Consultants archaeology lab in Monroeville and to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Some of their teeth and bone marrow was sent to England for DNA analysis. The church burial records, written in archaic German script, were deteriorated and illegible, and there were no other written records or maps identifying the graveyard. Clearly the cemetery had never been moved. But why had the church eliminated all trace of it from the face of the Earth? . . . . There is no evidence that church members knew of the cemetery disturbance in 1911. Exactly how and why the cemetery was neglected and abandoned over the next 40 years was never determined, but old urban church cemeteries traditionally have been vulnerable in the competition for land. By 1911, the Voegtly Church congregation had assimilated to a point where it was beginning to lose its institutional memory. Services in English were introduced in 1913, and by 1926 Voegtly Church had been renamed the Pilgrim Evangelical Church of Pittsburgh. In 1950, the old cemetery, where there had been no burials for almost a century, was paved and graveled. . . . . (Read the entire article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/lifestyle/20031028cemetery1028fnp2.asp )