A research effort based at Georgetown University has uncovered burial sites containing the remains of more than 1,000 children near juvenile reform schools and youth detention facilities in 29 states, according to findings released by the university's Center for Youth Justice. The scale of the discovery has stunned families who learned only recently that relatives they never knew existed had died in state custody, sometimes more than a century ago.
The project, known as the Forgotten Children Initiative, began in February and focuses on identifying children who died at 40 reform schools and youth detention centers nationwide. Researchers are also attempting to locate surviving family members so that relatives can learn what happened to ancestors who were institutionalized as children and never returned home.
One of the most significant sites identified so far is in Cheltenham, Maryland, where the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children operated from 1870 to 1937. The burial ground there holds the remains of 230 Black boys, making it the largest known gravesite tied to the institutions examined by the researchers.
The cemetery sits in a wooded area across the street from the facility, adjacent to the Maryland Veterans Cemetery. Small grave markers for the children remain visible among the trees, according to reporting by NPR and WAMU. The location of the graves, separate from any formal memorial, underscores how long the deaths went unacknowledged by the institutions that held the children.
For families, the discoveries have been painful and disorienting. Veronica Spears, who lives in Fort Washington, Maryland, described trembling as she read a letter informing her that her grandfather had a brother who was sent to the reformatory and died there at age 12. She told NPR in an interview that she could not initially explain to her husband what was wrong. "We never knew," she said of the relative's existence and death.
Spears is among 16 families that researchers have connected to children who died at the Cheltenham facility, which served Black youths during an era of legally enforced racial segregation. The institution was part of a broader network of segregated reformatories that operated across the country, often with minimal oversight and few records documenting the treatment or deaths of the children confined there.
The Georgetown center's work is unusual for its geographic reach. Rather than focusing on a single institution, the initiative has mapped burial locations at 40 facilities in 29 states, assembling a national picture of a practice that historians say was widespread but largely hidden from public view. Many of the graves are unmarked or lie on land that has since been repurposed, researchers said.
The findings raise difficult questions about accountability. Most of the institutions involved have long since closed, and the agencies that operated them have been reorganized or replaced. Legal remedies are limited, and in many cases the records that might explain how individual children died have been lost or were never created in the first place. The initiative's approach has therefore emphasized documentation and family notification rather than litigation.
The discoveries also arrive amid continuing scrutiny of the juvenile justice system. Advocates who work on youth incarceration argue that the graves are a historical extension of concerns that persist today, including inadequate medical care, isolation, and the use of restraint in facilities holding minors. Whether the historical record will influence current policy remains uncertain, but researchers say the sheer number of deaths underscores how vulnerable institutionalized children have been across generations.
Identifying the children has required painstaking work. Researchers have cross-referenced institutional records, cemetery listings, census data, and other archival sources to link names to burial sites. In many instances, the children's deaths were noted only in passing, without cause or family notification. The center has described the effort as an attempt to restore identities to people who were effectively erased from official memory.
For descendants like Spears, the information has filled a gap that had persisted for decades. She said her family had no knowledge of the great-uncle who died at 12, and the letter from researchers was the first indication that he had ever existed. The experience reflects what other families connected to the project are likely to face as researchers continue to identify remains and trace living relatives.
The House of Reformation in Cheltenham is now the site of the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, meaning the grounds have continued to be used for holding juveniles long after the original institution closed. That continuity has unsettled some observers, who note that children are still confined within sight of the graves of children who died there generations earlier. The juxtaposition has become a focal point for those studying the legacy of youth incarceration in Maryland.
Researchers plan to continue the identification work, expanding the list of confirmed burials and reaching out to more families. The project's findings have already prompted calls for greater preservation of the burial sites and for formal recognition of the children interred there. Whether such recognition will extend to a broader reckoning with the institutions themselves is a question the initiative's work has placed before state officials and the public alike.
At the Maryland site, the rows of small markers in the woods stand as the most concrete evidence of the deaths documented so far. For the families now learning of these losses, the graves represent both a discovery and an unresolved grief. "They found out that my grandfather had a brother," Spears said, describing a revelation that arrived more than eight decades after the child's death and without any explanation of how he died or why his family was never told.
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