Re: Hundreds of Hours to Identify Hunley Remains

Date: April 15, 2004

"Anthropologist spent hundreds of hours identifying Hunley remains

BY DAN HUNTLEY Knight Ridder Newspapers

CHARLESTON, S.C. - (KRT) - Bones talk. And Doug Owsley listens.

As chief forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, he has devoted part of the last four years to identifying and putting a face on each of the eight sailors who died aboard the Confederate Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy warship. The Hunley sank in 1864 with a full crew and was recovered in August 2000 off Sullivans Island, S.C.

On Saturday, the remains of the Hunley crew will be carried through the historic streets of Charleston in a 4.5-mile procession that will end with a funeral at Magnolia Cemetery. About 30,000 people are expected.

On Friday morning, a half-dozen descendants of the Hunley crew gathered in Charleston and talked about the submarine and Saturday's ceremonies.

"All the Confederate re-enactment stuff is fine ... but what I'm doing here is attending the funeral of a family member," said silver-haired Emma Ditman of Silver Spring, Md. She's the great-grandniece of Joseph Ridgaway. The native Northerner said she knew little about her Confederate ancestor until recently. "Up until about a month ago, I had always identified with the Union side," she said.

Owsley helped assemble a team of historians, genealogists and other forensic scientists to research the crew's past and to create facial reconstructions that were unveiled this week in Charleston. Owsley's team began with no photographs or sketches of any of the crew, little family information and for several crewmen, not even their whole names.

"It was an intriguing case from the start, the deaths of eight men and what is, essentially, a (death) scene undisturbed for more than 135 years," said Owsley, who is in Charleston for the funeral. "This was a war grave, and regardless of your politics, these are fallen soldiers ... My role is to identify their remains and tell their story as best I can."

Researchers were lucky. Instead of finding a jumble of bones on one end of the 40-foot submersible, they found each crewman's remains intact. The men died at their workbenches alongside the hand crankshaft that powered the boat.

"There's no physical evidence of trauma, no panic or last-minute scrambling.

They fell in place where they sat," Owsley said. The Hunley sank for unknown reasons after sinking the Union blockade ship, the Housatonic. Researchers don't know whether the men drowned or asphyxiated from lack of oxygen when their vessel dropped 30 feet to the ocean floor on Feb. 17, 1864.

Researchers said that in one sense, the Hunley crewmembers were the test pilots of their day, eager to volunteer for innovative but dangerous technology. It would be another 50 years before another submarine sank an enemy ship. The remains were covered in a fine sediment that sealed out the oxygen and preserved them to an unusual degree.

Owsley said the crew's bones spoke to him in a variety of ways. They offered DNA, which was matched with the DNA of descendents to establish a positive ID for some of the bodies. They also gave a variety of clues to help establish how the sailors might have looked and lived. (In other cases, researchers are certain they know the identities but don't claim to have proved that scientifically.) Worn notches in the teeth of Frank Collins indicated he'd worked in a trade involving metal needles that he held in his mouth. Researchers traced Collins to Fredericksburg, Va., discovering both his grandfather and uncle were cobblers. Archaeologists recovered crewmen's shoes, some with the leather laces still in place.

Personal items - such as pipes, candles, pocketknives, vials, compasses and canteens - were also recovered. The reconstructed faces look eerily complacent, their eyes staring out of shadows of the 19th century and from the heart of the Civil War, which began at nearby Fort Sumter, S.C., in the Charleston Harbor.

"I was trying to achieve a lean, emaciated look. These men were not starving, but it was 1864, and the war was not going well for the South.

These men were not eating well," said forensic sculptor Sharon Long of Laramie, Wyo. She spent up to 200 hours on each head. "I studied photos of Civil War soldiers ... There weren't a lot of smiles."

Aided by research, Long could determine skin thickness; from the genealogist she learned of predominant hair and eye colors in the men's families. She studied the colorings of ethnicities to get the skin tones just right.

In the case of Cpl. J.F. Carlsen, that meant studying Scandinavians. Studying the men's molar teeth, the team identified four of the men as European and four as North American. "North Americans from the mid-1800s primarily ate corn, and Europeans grew up eating grains," Owsley said. "You examine the isotopes in their teeth, and it tells you where they're from."

Forensic genealogist Linda Abrams is accustomed to having file cabinets full of documents on the soldiers of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. With the crew of the Hunley, Confederate enlistment records were virtually nonexistent. "The federal government had little interest in preserving what little Confederate records did exist," said Abrams. "It was a hard trail to pick up, but after a while our incentive became, `These men's bones have been on a lab table too long; we need find out who they are and put them in the ground.'"

Abrams, who lives in Massachusetts, said there's not much awareness in New England of the Hunley crew and the burial this weekend. "There's this mystique down here about the Civil War that just doesn't exist in New England," said Abrams.

She has an ancestor who fought for the Union and was among those who died in the horrid conditions at the infamous Andersonville Prison in Georgia. "What people need to remember is these men were no less patriotic than any soldier who fought for the Union. They were soldiers who stood the line and died in war."

She added: "But when you look at these faces, you realize they were also once some mother's son. They were some child's father - husbands and brothers who never came home from the battlefield, until now."


© 2004, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)"