Researchers with Georgetown University's Center for Youth Justice have identified the burial sites of more than 1,000 children near juvenile detention facilities and reform schools in 29 states, according to the center's Forgotten Children Initiative. The project, which began in February, seeks to locate the graves of minors who died while in state custody and to trace any surviving relatives who may never have learned what happened to their family members.
One of the largest known burial grounds sits beside the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children in Cheltenham, Maryland, a facility that operated from 1870 to 1937. The wooded plot, located across the street from what is now the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center and adjacent to the Maryland Veterans Cemetery, contains the remains of roughly 230 Black boys, according to the researchers' findings.
For relatives like Veronica Spears, the discovery arrived in the form of a letter that left her trembling. She told NPR that she could not immediately explain to her husband what was wrong. The correspondence informed her that her grandfather had a brother who had been sent to a reformation institution and died there at just 12 years old — a fact her family had never known.
Spears is among 16 families that Georgetown researchers have connected to children who perished at the Maryland facility. Her great-uncle is buried in the forested area across from the institution that once held him, a site marked by grave markers that have endured largely outside public awareness.
The initiative's scope extends well beyond Maryland. Since launching earlier this year, the team has documented burial locations in states across the country, piecing together a fragmented record of institutional deaths that spans decades of American history. The project represents one of the most extensive efforts to date to map what researchers describe as a national legacy of youth who died in custody.
The institutions involved include reform schools and youth detention centers, many of which operated during eras when children could be committed for vague offenses such as incorrigibility or vagrancy. Conditions in such facilities were often harsh, and records were inconsistently kept, making it difficult for families to learn the fate of children who were sent away.
The Center for Youth Justice has framed its work as both a historical accounting and a present-day effort to provide answers to descendants. Locating graves is only part of the task; researchers are also attempting to identify the children by name and to notify living relatives, a process that can take months or years given the scarcity of documentation.
The Maryland site carries particular significance because of its size and its connection to the segregated system of juvenile justice that prevailed for much of the facility's operation. The House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children was established specifically for Black youth, reflecting the racial separation that shaped such institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The burial ground's location — a wooded patch beside a veterans cemetery — underscores how easily these graves can be overlooked. Without markers visible from the road or records readily accessible to the public, the site remained unknown to many descendants until researchers began their inquiries.
Spears described her family's reaction as one of shock compounded by grief for a relative they never had the chance to know. The revelation that a 12-year-old boy died in state custody and was buried near the facility, without the family ever being told, illustrates the kind of hidden loss the initiative aims to bring to light.
The researchers' findings have implications beyond individual families. They raise questions about how states tracked — or failed to track — the deaths of children in their care, and whether those records were ever shared with the relatives legally entitled to know. The graves themselves serve as physical evidence of a system that, in many cases, left families with no accounting of what became of their children.
The Forgotten Children Initiative continues its work to identify additional burial sites and to connect with families across the 29 states where graves have been found. Each discovery adds to a growing picture of how widespread the practice of burying institutionalized children on or near facility grounds appears to have been.
For Spears, the letter from Georgetown researchers answered a question her family had never thought to ask, but it also opened a door to a history that had been effectively erased. She said the news left her shaken, and she is now among the relatives seeking to understand what happened to a boy who died more than eight decades ago.
The project's organizers say they intend to keep documenting the sites and notifying descendants, hoping that more families will be able to learn the truth about children who disappeared into the juvenile justice system and never came home. The work is slow and often relies on archival fragments, but researchers describe it as a necessary form of accountability.
The scope of the findings — over 1,000 graves across 29 states — suggests that the practice of burying children near the institutions that held them was not an isolated occurrence. Rather, it appears to reflect a broader pattern in which the deaths of incarcerated minors were handled quietly, with little public record and even less communication with the families left behind.
(0)