Grating the Nutmeg 154. Numbers to Names: Restoring Humanity to CT Valley Hospital Cemetery
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For over a century, almost 1700 people buried in the cemetery at the Connecticut Valley Hospital were identified with gravestones bearing only a number instead of a name. In the 1990s, names of the deceased were restored to the site. In this episode of Grating the Nutmeg, Natalie Belanger of the Connecticut Historical Society (https://chs.org/) is taking a look at a digital history project that will help expand our understanding of the lives of the people buried in that cemetery and of mental health care in Connecticut's past. Kaitlyn Oberndorfer, CREC history teacher and graduate student, has undertaken a project that will link genealogical and demographic information to the names in the cemetery, restoring some of the residents' lost humanity.
Look for Kaitlyn's finished project to go live online sometime in 2023. For a detailed history of the Connecticut Valley Hospital Cemetery, you can read the application that placed the site on the National Register of Historic Places.
You can click here to learn about the "Uncovering Their History" project that inspired "Numbers to Names"
Read more here:
https://www.ctexplored.org/unburying-hartfords-native-and-african-family-histories/
And listen to our podcast episode here:
For more about the treatment of Civil War soldiers at the Connecticut Valley Hospital, read more here:https://www.ctexplored.org/civil-war-soldiers-heart/
And for more about the treatment of mental illness in Connecticut, read more here: https://www.ctexplored.org/treating-the-mind-in-times-past/
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This episode of Grating the Nutmeg was produced by Natalie Belanger, Adult Programs Manager at the Connecticut Historical Society and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan of High Wattage Media at https://www.highwattagemedia.com/