Rob,
The site that we worked on in southern Illinois (mid 19th century
cemetery) most definitely had exhumed graves. In fact that was
what prompted our excavation. According to the local history, all
the graves from the cemetery that we excavated had been
exhumed and the material moved to the new cemetery in the late
1800s. Big surprise, they in fact had not been moved, however,
we did have graves in the cemetery that showed signs of having
been opened prior to our excavation. I suspect that those were
graves of some of the more important townspeople that were in
fact exhumed. The inhabitants of the town we were working in
were fairly irritated that there were actually people in the graves
that supposedly had been moved.
Diane Houdek
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