Scattered

Janet Young is a curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History, focusing on human skeletal collections. As a curator, she acts as a subject matter expert and bridges museum collections with research and exhibits for public knowledge.

In this episode we talk about:

• Janet’s journey to becoming a curator.



• How she became involved in the excavation of the 19th century Barrack Hill Cemetery in Ottawa during infrastructure works in 2013-2017.



• How records can help trace the movement of remains discarded or moved when the land was developed.



• Janet’s research to understand the lives of individuals through skeletal analysis and comparisons to historical records.



• Occupation markers, sometimes discernible from skeletal markers left by activities like mercury exposure for hat makers.



• Reburials of excavated remains.



• How perspectives on treatment of human remains have changed.

You can contact Janet through the Canadian Museum of History: https://www.historymuseum.ca/learn/research/#close

Janet’s blog about her discoveries in the Barrack Hill Cemetery, The Bone Detective: https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/bone-detective-introduction/

You can visit the remains of the Barrack Hill Cemetery at Beechwood: https://www.beechwoodottawa.ca/en/foundation/history/barrack-hill-cemetery-beechwood

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Notes from the start

The first of the 2022-23 Saskatchewan videos of the Scavenging Study are up: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/

I’ll place the mapping video here too once it’s finished — hopefully soon!

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at [email protected]

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All So Janet, I’m gonna get you to say who you are and where you work in your role because I don’t want to mess it up.

Janet Young: Yeah, my name is Janet Young. I am the curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What does that mean that you are a curator? Let’s delve into that a little bit.

Janet Young: So a curator is someone who is the subject matter expert for different fields. So we have curators history, archeology, ethnology. So there’s a number of curators that work at the Museum and our role is to steward collections and work on projects for the general public, work on exhibits. So sort of the bridge between the content of the holdings of the museum and the public, is bringing that information, and doing research to add to the public knowledge about a certain subject matter.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, and you’ve been there a long time.

Janet Young: Okay, so yes, I’ve been there a long time. I‘ve been there 30 years. The first — this is one of those things — that when I talk to students, I always say, you’re not gonna get the job at the top right away. So I started as a volunteer after I did my Master’s and it wasn’t even in my field, but I started volunteering at the Museum and eventually I made my way over to the physical anthropology section and then I started getting contracts and so I got a series of contracts for about seven years and then they created a position for me and then I worked in that first several years and then the curator of physical anthropology at the time retired and I ended up with his position. So if students ever come to me and say how did you get this position? It’s a lot of sticking to it and not giving up. And just doing your best to get your foot in the door and then working your way up. So yeah, it’s been 30 years. But as you’re trying to work your way into a position the time goes fast, so it’s not so bad.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what is your educational background?

Janet Young: So I have an undergraduate degree in ancient history and archeology. My Master’s is from England, so it’s Masters of Science in human osteology, paleopathology and funerary archeology. And then I came back home and I started working at the museum and at that time I did my PhD in population health. And even though it’s a subject that is very much modern day and related to modern populations, the program allowed me to work on past populations. So it was a good fit for me at the time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Yeah, those people in biological anthropology. We always seem to have very diverse backgrounds.

Janet Young: I know, right? You kind of find your way, find your path. When I first started, when I left high school many moons ago, I wanted to work in archeology and so, you end up on the circuitous path, through different programs and when I was done, I didn’t know what to do. So at that point there was really no computers. So you went to The Graduate Studies Center and you started looking through pamphlets to see what was interesting and I found one on human remains and that was it for me. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. And so yeah, it just starts on a path, but I think for a lot of people in archeology or in biological anthropology, it’s a circuitous path that really find what you’re interested in. So.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I find it’s not one of those I guess subjects that isn’t really talked about well in high school number one, so when you’re going into university and trying to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life because everybody does that when they’re 17, they know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their life and then when you get to university, who talks about death and bodies and human remains like it’s just

Janet Young: Yeah, yeah, for mine it was classical archeology. So it was like here’s a pot, here’s a Roman pot, here’s another Roman pot and here. And so I knew very quickly that that’s not something I wanted to do. But I did take a death and dying class that of sort of piqued my interest in the subject matter and trying to understand how that worked not just now but in the past as well, so it’s sort of piqued my interest for that aspect of archeology that no one had into really introduced me at that point, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: How did you start working with the Barrick Hill Cemetery?

Janet Young: So it’s really interesting. Well, I think it’s interesting. So when I was working on another project, someone from down the hall was actually the curator of Ontario archeology called me into their office and told me that was I aware of the excavations that were happening in downtown, Ottawa? So we knew that there was a cemetery there for a long time and so, I didn’t at the time, but someone that we both knew, his office overlooked the site, and so that’s who called my colleague. And so that’s really how I found out more details and then I had worked with the police quite a bit. So I reached out to the head of the Ident unit to say, I don’t know if you’re aware, but there is a cemetery there from the 1800s. And so at that point I was put in contact with the archaeologist on the site and we just established working a relationship. And the museum came in to an agreement with the city and so the city allowed it to be my research project and the museum gave me the time to do all the work.

So I was actually down on the site for two summers with the excavation crew. And it’s very odd when you’re… the first site was in one of the main roads in downtown Ottawa, so you’re below road level and there’s people walking by on the sidewalk, but they’re screened off. So you can see normal life going back and forth and you’re basically sitting in the middle of a cemetery. So I came at it, from, I don’t say haphazardly, but I was lucky enough to know enough people in and around the area that informed me of this project and I was allowed to be a part of it, which I really appreciated.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Tell me a little bit about the cemetery itself. So it sounds like downtown Ottawa was built upon this cemetery. And did they know that it was there when they had built up downtown and then what led to then the excavation of the cemetery?

Janet Young: So what happened was…okay, so it’s really an interesting story about how historical cemeteries are used.

So when Colonel By came to the region to build the canal, he had a lot of people, an influx of workers. So he came here in 1826. Canal construction started around 1827. So there was an influx of workers. There was really nothing on that side of the Ottawa River. On the other side of the Ottawa River, there was a lumber industry already but on our side of the Ottawa River there wasn’t anything. So when Colonel By came to town then he started bringing people in, people were hired to do different aspects of the construction. And then there was an infrastructure that came in around these people, so hotels were built and stores were built and stuff like that. So what happened was Colonel By was given the land that Lord Dalhousie had purchased. So it was a bunch of land where the Parliament Hill is today and then into Lower Town. Below that area, the land was owned by Nicholas Spar who was a former lumber yard worker. When Colonel By was doing the canal. he wanted land on either side of the canal so he purchased it. But then he also wanted the land below, what is now Parliament Hill, which is Nicholas Sparks’ land, because they were worried about creating a fortress or something should the Americans attack again, because it was a byproduct of the War of 1812. So what happened was he took 88 acres from Nicholas Sparks.

Yvonne Kjorlien: He just took it.

Janet Young: He just took it. I know they passed the Rideau Canal Act that said basically if you need any land for the Rideau Canal you can take it. And he made the excuse that the land was going to be used as a place to hold water, to help with the workings of the canal. Which was basically a lie. So he took the land. So in those early days, there was no settlers cemetery on the south side of the Ottawa River. People would be ferried over to the other town on the North side, but there was really nothing on the south side. So Colonel By gave, or set aside acreage, for a cemetery that was actually on Nicholas Sparks’ land that he had expropriated. So basically where the cemetery was below Parliament Hill, on a little walking path that went from upper Bytown at the time to lower Bytown. So it’s right in the middle and it was right beside a cedar swamp. So he allowed the cemetery to be created.

We really know nothing about the cemetery other than some of the burial records, but we really know nothing. Nicolas Sparks fought to get his land back and fought to get his land back. So in the late 1840s, he actually got his land back. And so, yeah, I know. It was a very long legal battle. He started almost immediately and he hired a lawyer and fought to get his land back. And so, the cemetery was still there and it’s right in the middle of this prime land, between upper and lower by town. So we started doing was selling lots in and around the area. And then he sold for very cheap price, land that was used for an upper Bytown Market. And we see little breadcrumbs in the newspaper about he paved this road or they made this road going through. So the remains were found on Queen Street. So about in 1851, I think, we have something in the paper saying that they put Queen Street through to the market which means they put a street right over the burial ground.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh!

Janet Young: So we start seeing that and it doesn’t look like the cemetery was ever moved. It looks like people who had money and could see what was happening, moved their loved ones. But there was never any formal moving of the cemetery. To the point where, in the 18– I want to say 1854, around there, people who are poor, who were in Bytown, petitioned the city to pay someone to remove the remains of their loved ones because they were becoming exposed in the area of this road. So, we know for a fact that the cemetery was not moved in any formal way.

And so the city just built up around it. Like Nicholas Sparks kind of just didn’t want it to be there anymore. So they just started, selling off lots and creating all these different infrastructure and then people just forgot that it was there. Basically, that’s what happened. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh. But it sounds like it was used for what, 15, 20 years or so.

Janet Young: Mmm.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah? okay.

Janet Young: It was about I estimate that it opened in the spring, I think, of 1828, the cemetery. And it was closed around 1843. So not even 20 years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, okay.

Janet Young: So yeah, and they said it was two acres when closed? So, it was pretty big. Pretty big site.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. And how many individuals do you figure at its maximum? Maybe…

Janet Young: Think the archaeologists thought about 500–

Yvonne Kjorlien: Really? Okay.

Janet Young: –at the time. And we only have small pockets of people and the cemetery was disturbed, starting in the 1870s, so maybe 20 years after it was paved over. People started finding bodies as the infrastructure was being put in.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. So I guess it was just more of a natural urban process to build up over this cemetery.

Janet Young: Yeah, they just wanted to forgotten.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. then…

Janet Young: — which is sad, but it’s just, a lot of historic cemeteries have the same thing: take the way the headstones and just pave over.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So then, what were they doing that there was this excavation going on in the middle of the street and when you got involved. What kind of prompted all that?

Janet Young: Ottawa was putting in the infrastructure for a light rail service —

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!

Janet Young: — which runs now underneath Queen Street. But they were doing infrastructure work replacing water mains on Queen Street itself so that area is basically right through the middle of the cemetery and when they when they dug for to put in the water main, they hit bodies, basically, and then They called the police because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you hit bodies. And it went to, there’s the Ontario government, and when it was deemed to cemetery then the archaeologists that they hired had to go and enter an agreement between the city, the province, and anyone who was identified as a descendant.

The Ontario government put an ad in the local paper asking if you think you are descendant of these individuals, could you please come forward and speak for them. One person came forward, and she was not sure whether her ancestor had been moved or not. And so in the end she found out that they had been moved, so she was really not part of the process after that and the churches stepped in.

So the churches who had buried individuals in the cemetery — it was a settler cemetery, it was multi-denominational. So the heads of those churches became the representatives of the individuals.

So it was the representatives the City of Ottawa, the Province, and the archeology company who came to an agreement and I became part of that agreement for work on the individuals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Yeah, it’s no small undertaking to excavate a cemetery.

Janet Young: No, it is not and I’m so happy that the archaeologists knew exactly what to do and how to do it because the remains were first discovered in late 2013, but they were not completely, they were not removed or excavations did not progress until the following summer. So it took, like, months to get everything.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you have any idea — I know you came later in the process — so I don’t know if you know this, but were they expecting to dig up bodies? Because I can only imagine the poor person on the excavator, just merrily digging away and then suddenly ‘What is in my bucket?’

Janet Young: I think what happened was the city had done a sort of an archaeological, it’s a sort of a report to say if you’re going to hit any archaeological sites, the city had done that. They were told that there was a cemetery there, but it probably been moved. So there was no expectation of finding anybody. And so I think it was a shock when they did. Obviously. But it’s funny because the whole site is crossed with construction events. So there’s a water main trench and then there’s a trench for Bell and then Rogers had done a trench line through the site, but they had dug at night. So when they dug at night, they did their trench they put their cement in and everything. So we were finding human remains on the underside of those cement conduits because they’re digging at night so they didn’t see. And so the fact that they were digging in the day and then they find something large enough that is recognizable to a construction worker? It was enough for them to stop the process. And then anytime there’s digging done in the area they have to have an archaeologist site to sort of watch them. And so the excavations at the site were actually… the Queen Street one was done one summer and the archaeologist had a map of the original downtown before there was buildings or anything. And there was one parking lot that had always been a parking lot. It had never been built upon, never been something else. To this day, it is still a parking lot. And so they’re thinking this is one place that’s not disturbed if anything ever happens we can excavate full individuals and not just truncated burials. And so what happened was the landowner got a permit from the city – I don’t know how — to do a trench for a gas line in the winter of 2016. And what did he do? He went right through a number of burials.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No.

Janet Young: And so, yes, yes. The pristine section. And so that’s why there was a second field season. In 2016, 2017 so that parking lot could be fully excavated but it was just supposed to be the street and then that happened. And then what happened — so if that’s not – so, and I don’t know who’s talking to who or if anyone’s talking to anyone, but for the LRT, they continued trenching down the road where the remains were found initially, so Queen Street. They kept going down the road. So you’re outside the boundaries of the cemetery at this point, all the way down the road. And they were still recovering human remains. And that’s because in the 1940s, a water main was put in down Queen Street and they were taking fill or dirt from the cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh.

Janet Young: And so they were depositing the people, basically remnants of the individuals all the way down Queen Street. So the archaeologists had it was something crazy like a hundred and sixty dump trucks full of earth, that they screened for human remains.

Yvonne Kjorlien: My God, that’s a lot.

Janet Young: Isn’t that a lot? Isn’t that crazy? I appreciate them so much. A lot of work. So the remains that we have for study were actually from those three events and the city is well aware of what’s in the area now and so they are very good about having an archaeologist on site when the construction crews go in to dig beneath the streets now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You probably know more about that cemetery and about that area than they did back in the 1850s.

Janet Young: If it’s crazy about information that swimming in my head. Because it’s all a mystery. It’s like why does this happen? And you have to go through and you pull on that thread and you follow that mystery to figure out this or that or the other thing. I mean, it’s — and going through old newspapers and, to me it’s just fascinating to try and understand what happened. Why are these people left behind? What happened that the street could be put right over where they were? What happened? So it’s all a mystery and it’s one of the let’s see more interesting thing is to try and see if you can figure it all out. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about some of what you found because I find it just fascinating and I’m hoping the listeners will too because you’ve got a blog, “Bone Detective” at historymuseum.ca so if anybody wants to search that, and I find your blogs are contain fascinating stuff so I was wondering if we could touch on some of them and if you’ve had some updates.

Janet Young: Yeah, so I mean obviously there’s lots of stories that have come out of the research and the reason why I initially wanted to do the blog series and the museum supported me, which is really great, was because it was ahead of the reburials and so the remains from that have been excavated have all now been reburied. So it was ahead of the last reburial. And what I really wanted to do is try to bring the people of Ottawa into that history that they might not otherwise know and about these individuals. And so I tried to cherry pick some of the individuals who I was able to do a lot of research on and I had sort of an interesting sort of connection to. And ones that, it’s like a blog series is what, I don’t know, 800, 1000 words. It’s really short, right? And you’re looking at it going, that is five years of work summarized in that little space.

So one of the individuals the one that was found to have all sorts of track marks — I don’t know another way to say it — on his remains and then perforations and then at this crusty substance that were in some of these perforations. And I was able to figure it out, but it took a really long time, you start with: is this something that the body is producing? Is it some for form of cancer? Is it something that he was experiencing? What’s the distribution? How do I see it? There was not a lot of complete skeletons at the site, and he had one of them which was very helpful, to look for distribution. So you start down that path and then you’re like, what are the accretions? Could it be a tumor? Could it be something from gout? Could it be… and so you start going through all of these ideas and then running them to ground and then you’re like, nope, that’s not it, nope, that’s not it.

And so it was really interesting because, when we first did the excavations, I had sent coffinwood off to be identified. And when the identification came back, he basically said “I can’t identify it because it’s bark.” And it was like, “what do you mean it’s bark?” And so I did that it just tuck that sort of information away. And then when I was studying this individual with all these changes on his skeleton, I remembered about the bark and so it occurred to me that it could be not something that he was doing, but something that was being done to him. So I actually did a lot of research and it came… the best solution to this mystery was that it was beetles. So because the bark in the coffins — and I have never found another reference to this. This is the only time… like I had to… there is no reference for this being done at all. And that is Ottawa was a lumber town, Bytown was a lumber town. And so they were taking the logs and they were squaring them in the mills. So they’re taking off the sapwood and the bark and squaring the logs. That sapwood and bark has no value. Even to this day, a whole truck full is 20 bucks. It has absolutely no value because these people in the cemetery were the lowest socioeconomic status, they were building their coffins out of these squarings. And they’re putting the bark side into the coffin so you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were basically the leftovers of the squaring industry. And so what happened was beetles, especially … there’s certain kind of beetles that were very prevalent in Ottawa because of the lumbering industry. They have a multi-year life cycle. So the eggs would have been laid, they would have taken these pieces and built his coffin and buried him. And then in the ground the beetle larvae would have emerged and the only food source was him.

And so the track marks and the perforations, if you look at a log underneath the bark, it’s all beetle activity where they’re eating the top layer of the bone. And then the perforations are where they are creating their nests. And the accretions that I send off for analysis and no one could identify? They’re actually frass. So that it’s basically the beetle poop that they used to line their nests.

And so that was what was in his bones. And so this is a multi-year process of speaking to lumber experts, to Ottawa valley experts about the timber industry, speaking to beetle experts from different places in the world, like trying to get all this information. And all that time and all these years have been put into a 500-word blog series. But it’s so cool, right? It’s one of those things, and that’s why I love doing this research,  there’s no mention of it anywhere. It’s just one of those things that they were just doing because it was cheap and easy, but it wasn’t shared widely. It was nowhere in the literature. It’s nowhere. And I think that that one to me is super interesting. And that’s not the body reacting to it, but actually the beetles creating something on the body.

I mean, there’s other stories of identifying what people were doing for a living based on the remains and one of the main ones that I put in the blog series was the lady who was, we believed to be a milner, which was another one of those — she was the only one in the cemetery. She’s lying on her right side and she had a mat of hair that she was lying on. And so first we thought it was a horsehair pillow and I sent the hair off for identification and it came back as human. And so there was a lot of coffin wood that was stuck to it. So I peeled the coffin wood away, and you could see the styling, you could see the curls, you could see how it was pulled back over her ear. And so it ended up being her hair. And all so within her cranial vault there was a very soft, almost loamy, it’s almost dry peat moss, that was inside her cranial vault and I had it analyzed and it came back as brain. So yeah, she was the only one at the site who had preserved brain tissue and preserved hair. I was working with a scientist Parks Canada trying to figure out what is this and everything like that. Then I started noticing skeletal changes on her and and so I noticed her teeth lot of pockmarks in them. Where I have a tailor from the site, he has the same sort of thing from holding pins between your teeth, but it wasn’t to the same extent so I didn’t think she was really sewing anything.

And then she had these changes inside her knees, where the ACL attaches, anterior cruciate ligament attaches. And she had some grooves on the inside of a patella. So I knew that she was holding her legs at a 45 degrees to create the grooves in the patella and that she’s pulling her knees together, seated.

I did some research and this is exactly the position that a milner would take. So the milner would hold a head form between their knees while they worked on it.  So that would explain the skeletal changes and dental changes that I was seeing. But, again, why does she have preserved brain tissue? And why does she have preserved hair? Originally, I thought maybe she was embalmed,  but embalming really wasn’t a thing during the use of the cemetery, it didn’t really become a thing until after the Civil War, but we do know that those early embalming fluids contain mercury. So I was following sort of that thread of things and early milners, they’re all so termed hatters and in sort of Bytown or early Canada a lot of them were female. It was one of those occupations that females could hold at the time. And they would work with furs to create hats, and working with furs, they would use mercury. And so we know that mercury was used embalming so we know that it helps preserve tissue. So I did a bunch of research on the hatting industry and what they do actually crosses into the body. So she had a high degree of — I think it’s organic   versus inorganic mercury — so it tells that she wasn’t ingesting it because inorganic mercury is not small enough to go into the hair. So it wasn’t like she was ingesting. It was being left, leaving her body through her hair as it grew what that wasn’t happening. It was being infused into the hair. And again with the milner industry, they would have a lot of mercury vapor. And so it was the vapors that were going into her hair and it would also cross the blood brain boundary when they inhale it. So that’s why you get mad as a hatter because they were inhaling the mercury. That would explain why her hair is preserved and her brain preserved and no one else at the site had it because she was a milner. 

And so again lots of little threads that you have to keep pulling and so you follow a trail and you get some information that doesn’t really make sense and then you follow another trail and eventually all those pieces can come together to create a really good story. And so, I mean, those are just two of them. The cemetery was filled with really great stories and things that I don’t understand either. So I have a child who had dark circles inside their eye sockets. And so I thought, okay, they might have been buried with coins because the silver, as it deteriorates, could leave a dark staining inside their orbits. And then I had it sent off for testing. And it was burnt. And it was burnt and a really high level of heat. And so these were actually scorch marks, but they were just inside the eyes. So, I know! It’s like what is that?

Yvonne Kjorlien: My mind goes to strange and disturbed places with that.

Janet Young: I know! And I don’t know — is that something that happened postmortem? Obviously, the person wasn’t thrashing around when it happened. So is it some treatment postmortem? Is it — what is this? So even though I have some of these mysteries sort of solved there are still a number of them where it’s still, like, okay, I have to try and figure this out, but it’s very lengthy process to go through to try and do this. But I feel like for this population, that I want to try and tell all their stories fully so to me it’s worth the time and the effort to try and really understand who these people were and so, yeah. I mean, they’re mysteries in terms of they’re very interesting, but they’re also a story that’s there from this person and just to be able to really understand those stories and to tell them for other people I think is really important.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So on that note, what do you think that learning about these past populations gives us here now? What is the benefit of studying the past. I guess?

Janet Young: I think the benefit is to understand that, as a population or any population, you weren’t just sort of plopped somewhere. There’s people that came before. There’s people had really hard lives, that worked really hard to get us to a point in history where we are able to have what we have and do what we do, and I think for me — I live in Ottawa population of million people — just one person and I have so many stories. So it’s the idea that every person has a history, every person has a story to tell and I think that connecting us to the past through these stories, I think is important to ground us in our history. You know, yes, it was Bytown. Yes, they did this, I said this they did that, but to say, okay, there was this person here who worked really hard who exposed themselves to really harsh conditions just to survive. And to understand that those people – like, this is the first settler cemetery of Ottawa. These are the people that did most of the living and paying and dying in this town to create this town. They are the beginning of the nation’s capital population. And I think that for us to be able to respect them, respect those people in the past, we can only hope that we are respected the same in the future. That we are people throughout time. We’ve had our challenges and everyone’s story is different and to be able to connect people today to those stories, and understand what was sacrificed for them to be here and to be in this town, I think it’s really important.

And for Barrack Hill Cemetery, what has happened now, is that Beachwood Cemetery, which is the National Cemetery, has created a Barrack Hill Cemetery within their borders. And they do tours.  And so all these stories that I’m able to decipher and provide them, are being passed down to all these individuals who go on these tours and try to understand the history of Ottawa and the history of the working class, even people — they’re not the people that had the money and had the power and they were the people that were there every single day working to survive. And so I think it’s important that we understand that. That we came from something, that everything around us was built by somebody else. And to appreciate that aspect of our lives today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we have a tendency to take things for granted. Don’t we?

Janet Young: Yes, we do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice to be able to say, yeah, there are others here before us and they created this and you’re right, we didn’t just manifest ourselves here adults in this city place wherever there are others here before us and they helped create where we are today.

Janet Young: Yeah, and I mean a lot of kids didn’t make it. They went through several epidemics: smallpox, cholera, to create something. So yeah, I think that we’re less if we don’t understand what we came from. Appreciate it, even.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So, what do you — you mentioned that the excavation took place in the middle of the street and you had pedestrians and life going on around you. What was that experience like when you had kind of modern day living people going on and here you were digging in the ground in the past.

Janet Young: It’s surreal, I guess.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you have people stop and ask you what you were doing?

Janet Young: No, because it was blocked they couldn’t see there was screens. And then what happened was after the excavations started, they put up tents. Because people could see down from the buildings because it’s right in the middle of downtown Ottawa. So people could see looking down from the buildings and so they put tents up. So there was some news articles about it happening, but the general person, and you could sit there and you can listen to people have everyday conversations walking by you and you’re like, wow. I think that anyone would have been fascinated by what was happening, but if you had opened it up, then traffic wouldn’t move at all. You’d have a gathering around, trying to be a part of it and understand it. So in that sense, it was nice that it was a blocked off, but really surreal.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so the remains have been all reburied. I’m guessing or there’s still some undergoing analysis or investigation.

Janet Young: So they’ve all been reburied. So the ones excavated the first season, so 2014, they were a reburied in 2017. And then the ones that were excavated in 2016, were we buried in 2019. And then we just had one in the fall for the remains that were found throughout the length of Queen Street. So that was the final reburial. So there is three burials, and each is commemorated with a plaque at the new Bararck Hill Cemetery at Beachwood. So

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool.

Janet Young: I want to say the city did an amazing job. They opened the first three burials. It was open to the public. They could come and was held at the Museum. They were allowed to come in and look at the boxes. So the City had made and everyone in burial box and tried to follow methods from the time. And so they were all there and people could come and pay the respects and try to understand more about the history and then the second and for the first second and third reburial They got a horse-drawn hearse, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow!

Janet Young: The majority of the remains were — except for the last reburial — were buried before, and then they had a representative coffin, and that individual was brought to the place of burial in a horse-drawn hearse that would have been representative of the time. So it was really well done. It was multi-denominational because many different religious groups were part of the cemetery. The City did an amazing job and trying to pull it all together, and to give them a respect that they might not had in life, obviously left behind where they were. So try to restore some of that respect to these people.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s interesting in the perspectives, because back in the 1850s, when the cemetery was still being used in the cemetery, the fact that it was paved over or built around and just wanted to be forgotten. It’s a very different perspective from how we treat human remains in cemeteries nowadays.

Janet Young: It’s very different. And I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how that evolved or why. There were early reports that people were using the crania the kids a soccer balls, the ones that were exposed at the site, right because there was a school nearby. And so I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how. They could have just done that now there’s articles in the paper for people who are going: you can’t do this, you can’t just go right over the cemetery, you can’t leave these people. But it didn’t change how things were handled at the time. I think the people that were part of the government of the city, they were just trying to they’re more concerned about their economics and they just went and did it anyway.

There was a large transient population at the time so, people weren’t really that linked to the past as much as I think now. But I’m amazed. I’m actually just amazed at that. But we have it to this day. We have old historic burial grounds that are now parks, right? So I mean a generation after Barrick had close — there is an area in Ottawa called McDonald’s Gardens, and anyone who has moved from Barrack would have been moved to McDonald’s Gardens. It became the next major multi-denominational cemetery for the town. It’s a park now because they remove the headstones — some people were moved to Beachwood, others weren’t — they remove the headstones and they made it a park.

And so it’s the same thing with downtown Kingston. There’s all these old burial grounds that people just removed headstones and just use the space of something else. And people don’t know that. It’s not part of the general knowledge of the people that live around these spaces a lot of the times. It’s just a historic view that people are not aware of. And so yeah, I mean, I appreciate the fact that we’ve evolved into making them parks and not just digging up the bones and throwing them somewhere. I mean, that’s an evolution in itself, but we would never think of doing that to this day, right?. There is application. Yeah strange.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. I’m conscious of the time, although I would love to talk to you just for hours on this. It’s so interesting just one last question and it’s kind of off on a tangent, but I wanted to know that, if you could go back and visit your younger self, 20, 30 years ago, what would you tell young Janet? That, I don’t know, you would appreciate now.

Janet Young: I would tell her to enjoy the process. I think a lot of times you’re fighting so hard to advance yourself and to try and get things done and do things, that you don’t enjoy the evolution of your skills and the evolution of your knowledge and you don’t enjoy — it’s a situations that you have to try and get through as opposed to appreciating them and enjoying them for what they are. And I think that, for me, that would be the one thing that I would go back and say relax, just enjoy what you’re doing and appreciate it. And yeah, I think that that’s the main takeaway for me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Lovely. Janet this has been a delight. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about yourself and the Barrack Hill Cemetery.

Janet Young: Thank you for having me. I hope it didn’t babble too much. I have so much information in my head. So thank you for having me.

Transcribed by Google