Press

ALBANY, N.Y. -- The State Museum may not be able to give her a name but experts here can give her a face.

The approximately 250-year-old remains of a woman were found last April by Museum archaeologists, who monitored the South Pearl Street reconstruction by the state Department of Transportation.

Now, Museum archaeologists and a Museum sculptor are reconstructing her face using her skull to learn more about her life. She was buried in a Lutheran cemetery but either was overlooked when the cemetery was relocated or she may have been in an unmarked grave.

"It's just a fascinating opportunity," said Museum archaeologist Charles Fisher, who is leading the project. "By studying the skeleton, we learn about what an individual's life was like in this town. So far, we have found that it was one of incredible physical hardship." Fisher estimates that the woman, probably of Northern European descent, was between 40 to 45 years of age when she died. Records regarding the Lutheran cemetery that once occupied that section of South Pearl Street just south of State Street are incomplete and researchers may never know her name.

The bones detail that she had very strong muscles indicating she may have been a servant or a laborer, according to Fisher. They also show that she suffered from severe health problems, possibly including rickets as a child. Many of her teeth had fallen out years before she died.

The reconstruction of the woman's face is an ongoing process. So far, bone fragments have been re-attached to the skull by Museum archaeologist Andrea Lain.

Now, drawing from the expertise of State Police forensic experts, researchers at Yale University and paintings from that era, Gay Malin, a Museum preparator and a sculptor, is painstakingly creating molding casts of the skull. Malin will then take the cast of the skull and began to create a face using clay and other materials.

"I'll give it humanity," Malin said. "I'll make her human."

The casts will be kept as part of the Museum's collections and will be used in future exhibits and education programs in keeping with the Museum's role within the State Education Department. This skeleton, along with two others found during the excavation, will be buried during a ceremony in May with Albany's First Lutheran Church, the oldest congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Fisher said the historic cemetery shows that the Lutherans were given the right to freely assemble and bury their dead at this location. The property also included a church and parsonage built in the late 17th century.

"I think a really important thing is that the cemetery is actually physical evidence of religious tolerance in the colony," Fisher added.

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