Historic Cold Cases and CrossBones Burial Ground

I watch a series where a team of experts from multiple fields: DNA, historic document research, forensic reconstruction, and archaeoosteopathy, come together to discovery the identity and story around a skeleton. The one I wanted to write about from last night involved a girl's skeleton found in digging up a section of a very old, closed in 1853 burial ground for the building of a new structure. Several graves had to be moved. In this burial ground for the destitute of the poorest section of London, bodies were buried up to 10 deep in a grave with very little soil, to conserve space.

In summary, the skeleton the researchers studied was of a teenaged girl who died within a few years of the closing of the burial ground, because she was near the top. Her bones, skull and face were ravaged by syphilis lesions which were so old that they had to have been contracted about 10 years before she died, or when she was around 7. She had been a child prostitute in a place and time where people froze to death and starved to death as well as perishing from the innumerabe diseases ravaging the lowest poverty level of people in the poorest neighborhood in London, diseases like cholera nd typhus. At the time syphilus raged through the population at the rate of about 20 percent.

This child, likely would have had to barter sexual exploitation of her body for food to survive. Within a few years, her face would have been covered with syphilis lesions, and her nose was decaying off her face. She was suffering most of her life, and she had rickets from childhood starvation as well.

There were few ways for a woman to make a living in that period in any country. If you were lucky like my grandmother and great-grandmother (who gave birth to 4 sets of twins and two singles and was widowed) you had a trade. Theirs was sewing. From her early teens my GreatGrandmother was listed in the census as a seamstress/dressmaker. Both she and my grandmother took in piece work from the Schulkill Aresenal to make uniforms for the soldiers.

For the very poor such as the girl in the historic cold case, there was no such life raft and few places of refuge. For children and girls there was a constant danger of sexual exploitation by the depraved.

Even should a girl marry a man who had work enough to support them, soon, the expected compliance with the husbands' sexual demands and expecttions as rights would result in pregnancies, one right after the other. It is well documented in the narratives of slum volunteers how women suffered from the continuous pregnancies which brought more and more children into her responsibilty to provide food. Husbands blamed the wives for pregnancy and continued to demand sexual compliance. Even those rare professionals who had discovered rudimentary forms of birth control such as the re-usable 'French envelope' and condum made from animal intestines which could be washed and re-used, were not protected from syphilis or any other of the many forms of venereal disease. >p/> It is no wonder to me that the far right wing wishes to deprive women of forms of birth control as well as forms of self-reliance in the workplace to force women back into economic dependence and hence, enforced sexual compliance.

They reconstructed the face of the girl whose skeleton they had researched. They found her age and her name through cross referencing veneral clinic ward registries and death and burial registries. Her reconstructed face with the syphilis pustules and the variation they constructed without the ravages of the disease were enough to break your heart.

It is a wonder to me that not more is said about the evil of raw lust and lack of self control. And this isn't an old time thing - the recent Jeffrey Eppstein scandals reveal that this evil still persists and flourishes! Young girls caught in economic desperation are exploited by the lure of money and social access to the rich and powerful. They are degraded, discarded, and crushed by the cruelty and reality of the cycle of shame and loss of faith in humanity they found themselves victimized by.

The young girl whose skeleton revealed so much about a place and time, didn't die of syphilis though she was in the final phases of it already. She died of pneumonia and I couldn't help but think how lucky she was to die in the hospital of pneumonia rather than in some foul alley of freezing, starvation and syphilitic decay to be gnawed by rats until her body was found.

Sorry this was such a grim story and such a sad one, but it is the reason for the Women's Movement and for the Birth Control Revolution. We must have education, careers, and reproductive choices. We cannot be dependent upon the mercy or crumbs of the ones with money. We must have our own money.

Most of the Historic Cold Case stories are sad because, of course, they are of people who died! The one before was a little boy, and the one before that was an English knight killed in the battle for Stirling Castle with the Scots. It is an interesting show in how they solve the intricate mystery of identification. One episode at a time is enough, however.

A final note: