Who Was the 8-Year-Old Boy Buried Among Colonial America’s Elite? DNA Study Has Answers

Among 49 sets of remains analysed from a 17th-century chapel cemetery in Maryland, one stood out for reasons that puzzled researchers: an 8-year-old boy with majority African ancestry, buried in a shroud and coffin alongside the colony’s most prominent English families.

The boy died sometime between 1667 and 1704, and genetic analysis found he carried largely African-derived ancestry along with roughly a quarter to a third European ancestry. Isotope analysis of his bones showed he was born in America rather than brought over from elsewhere. What makes his burial unusual is that he was wrapped in a shroud and placed in a gable-lidded coffin, following English customs typically used for the colony’s elite — enslaved people during this period were usually buried separately in unmarked plots, while indentured servants and free colonists shared cemeteries under English tradition.

The boy’s burial in line with those customs has led researchers to suggest he may not have been enslaved, though they caution that the line between indentured servitude and enslavement for people of African descent in the 17th century was often blurred, with servitude terms sometimes extending well beyond the usual four to seven years.

The findings come from a broader study, published this week in the journal Current Biology, analysing DNA from St Mary’s City, founded in 1634 as Maryland’s colonial capital. The same research identified Philip Calvert, the colony’s fifth governor, and Thomas Greene, its second governor — the latter’s burial site confirmed for the first time by matching his DNA against the 23andMe database and genealogical records.

Two other unusual burials belonged to young men in their twenties, likely recent Irish immigrants based on chemical signatures in their bones; neither was buried in a coffin, and their skeletons showed signs of heavy labour and poor health consistent with indentured servitude. Across all 49 burials, researchers traced more than 1.3 million living genetic relatives, with the largest cluster tied to Kentucky through the postwar migration of Maryland’s Catholic families.