History in their bones

Remains unearthed from an old Guelph burial ground lay bare the deadly challenges of 19th-century life

- MEGAN OGILVIE

Reaching high, Megan Brickley grasps a large, lidded box from the top shelf of a storage case in her small university lab.

“Here she is,” Brickley says, setting the box on a nearby table. “Skeleton 100.”

Lifting the lid, she peers inside at the loose collection of bones resting on a piece of brown felt.

There’s a skull and a pair of long, straight thigh bones. A jumble of vertebrae. Smaller bones — some the size of marbles — from hands and feet. Two sides of a lower jaw, each with a row of teeth still startlingly white.

“I’m not sure what she died of; finding the cause of death can be difficult,” says Brickley, a paleopathologist, meaning she studies human remains to understand injuries and diseases of the past.

She picks up a thigh bone, then the skull, turning them over in her hands.

“No obvious signs of injury, no obvious smack on the head. Probably, she died of one of the many infectious diseases that people had at this time. One of those desperate acute infections.”

Skeleton 100 is among the collection of 115 individual human remains stored here at Hamilton’s McMaster University.

The individuals who make up this collection — believed to be among the largest in Canada currently available for research — died between 1827 and 1853 and were buried in an all-faith cemetery in Guelph, about 100 kilometres west of Toronto.

The skeletons — some intact, some incomplete — were found in unmarked graves beneath a downtown parking lot, and were recovered in 2021 and 2022 as part of a redevelopment project that includes Guelph’s new central public library.

Carefully catalogued and stored in cream-coloured boxes, the skeletons are now on loan to McMaster’s Department of Anthropology.