Reburial of ancestors from first church grounds to OLB Memorial Gardens

BELEN — History is often thought to be fixed, immutable, but there is a plethora of new information to be learned, stories to be added and facts uncovered.

What was once thought to be little more than stories has been turned into reality after seven years of archaeological exploration in the city of Belen.

Specifically, exploration and investigation in Plaza Vieja — Belen’s Old Town and what was once the heart of the community. In 2017, a team of bio-archeologists came to the Hub City at the invitation of local historian and genealogist Samuel Sisneros.

His questions to these modern explorers? Had the first Our Lady of Belen Catholic Church really stood on a plot of land on what is now Wisconsin Street? Did the colonial village of Belen and the mission plaza he’d traced his lineage to really exist?

With permission from the private landowners and the state of New Mexico, and the blessing of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, in the summer of 2018, a group of bio-archeologists began working. The main goal of the project was to find the foundation of the original church, but they knew there would be human remains discovered.

As the area developed through the centuries, local residents discovered human bones on a regular basis, which seemed to offer proof of the church and its cemetery being in the area. Before the project even moved a teaspoon of dirt, the researchers made a promise to the community — any remains found would be treated with respect and returned to holy ground when the project concluded.

After seven years of work — five in the field and two spent doing research due to COVD in 2020 and 2021 — the remains found at the site were reinterred at Our Lady of Belen Memorial Garden, the cemetery adjacent to Our Lady of Belen Catholic Church on 10th Street.

A memorial Mass conducted by pastor Fr. John Kumani the morning of Feb. 21 was attended by about three dozen people, some who are descendants of those found at the old church.

“This is about remembering,” Kumani said. “These ancestors are a part of our lives. Why do we remember?

“This may not be a fresh memory of how they made their tortillas but we remember their faith. Their memory is a product of the faith shared in that church. Their love is handed down in prayers. Even though we don’t have fresh memories, they are still with us.”

Twenty plain white banker boxes containing the ancestral remains were stacked at the front of the altar of the church, where they received dashes of holy water and were wreathed in the smoke of incense. In attendance were members of the field crews who came to Belen to unearth the history of Plaza Vieja and its people, including co-primary investigators Dr. Pamela K. Stone and Dr. Debra Martin.

The project finished in the summer of 2023 and did verify the Wisconsin property was indeed the location of the first Our Lady of Belen Catholic Church, with a large section of its original stone foundation documented.

‘I call it fate’

Years before the project began, Sisneros found himself at the Belen Harvey House Museum hoping to find some kind of documentation about Plaza Vieja. He overheard a woman talking to her granddaughter about their family history.

“I started a conversation and asked her if she knew where the older, historical part of Belen was. She smiled and said she lived there, and proceeded to show me a 1905 map exhibited in the museum,” Sisneros said in 2017.

On the map was a rectangle labeled “Old Town Church Ruins.” That started Sisneros on a six-year journey researching every primary document, secondary publication or oral history he could find on the early history of the area that became Belen.

That woman at the museum, Patsy Torres, was the first cousin to Alberta O’Neal, the owner of the property where the foundations of the old church lay beneath the dirt.

“When I met Samuel, some might call it happenstance but I call it fate,” Torres said. “This is a dream come true.”

As a child, she remembers her parents talking about a church but didn’t hear any real details, often shooed outside to play.

“I always wondered, ‘Was there really a church there?,’” she said last week.

Her aunt, Valentina “Tina” O’Neal — Alberta’s mother — was so sure the church had once stood on her property that she built a “museum of memory” at the location, complete with an outdoor altar.

Church archives show the first Our Lady of Belen was built in 1793 and recorded its last burial in 1861. That same year, a new church and cemetery, were built next to the 10th Street location, where the current and third Our Lady of Belen Catholic Church stands.

While church records recorded who was interred at the old church, there are no records of exactly where those individuals were buried on the property, a situation that led to many remains becoming intermingled. During the excavation to look for the foundation, Stone’s field crews did find what are called articulated remains — skeletal remains that are still grouped together as they were buried and belong to one person — in the area that would have been inside the church walls.

“They were in the center of the church, which is a highly respected, sometimes purchased, place to be,” Stone said. “But there is limited space, so every time you have a new interment, you are potentially dis-articulating something.”

Stories the bones told us

Knowing they were welcomed into the community by the descendants of the very people they would be unearthing, Stone and Martin were very cognizant they might well be asked to stop their project.

“This project, which is actually kind of unheard of and really unique, it’s really the way we should be doing this type of work. When we’ve presented papers at conferences over and over again, we’ve said this is how you do it. This is how you do community-engaged archeology,” Stone said. “The people have to be included in everything you do, and they have to be able to say, ‘Please don’t do that.’ And when they say don’t do that, you don’t do it.”

When the first fully articulated remains were found, work stopped immediately, and Torres and O’Neal were asked if they wanted to continue, she said.

“The stories the bones told us, luckily, the community wanted to know,” Martin said. “Patsy and Alberta very much wanted to know how did these people live?”

The bones showed people were injured and healed, were ravaged by scurvy, a severe deficiency of vitamin C. They showed devastating epidemics of small pox, measles, diphtheria, viral influenza and pertussis.

Church records show in the summer of 1816 something swept through the community of Belen that led to the death of many children. Excavations at the old church site recovered three children laid to rest together at the same time at the very front of the church — the place for the los angelitos.

“As Deb said, these epidemics came through and you think about what it meant to have kids then. And yet, there are people who lived until old age and many children who survived. That’s why we have all these families here,” Stone said. “It’s the memories of these people that made all this possible. I think that’s really important, particularly for this community.”

The torch is passed

Growing up, when Loren DeAnda would ask her grandmother about her ancestry, she was told she was Spanish.

“I knew there was more than that. I would look in the mirror when I was younger and I didn’t think I looked all that European,” DeAnda said while waiting for the memorial Mass to begin last week.

Curious about her origins, DeAnda began studying the genealogy on her mother’s side of the family and found ancestors as far back as the 1700s, some of who were buried at the old church, just two houses from where she grew up.

Marriage records of her ancestors show they are Spanish, Mestizo and Indigenous, with many classified as genizaro or coyote — the coded language of the time for the caste system that indicated they were slaves and servants.

When the tents went up at the Wisconsin Street property, DeAnda contacted Sisneros and began learning more about the church and her ancestors.

“We were taught to reject our Indigenous heritage, but there were still a lot of things, traditions that were passed down that were not necessarily European,” she said.

Now she knows she comes from people known for their survival and resilience, some of who were bought and sold at auction, taken from their communities, from their language, and relocated against their will.

“This has been incredible, life changing,” DeAnda said. “I’m very excited to see what the DNA studies show.”

Dr. Rick Smith, George Mason University, Indigenous STS Lab and faculty of Native studies at the University of Alberta, collected samples from the ancestral remains uncovered during the excavations and DNA samples from living descendants in the community.

Smith said the hope is to eventually let community members know how much of their genetic makeup comes from the Belen ancestors.

The remains, as well as the samples taken by Smith, were reinterred at the cemetery last week, along with a handful of clay beads found during the excavations.

“There are no artifacts,” Stone said. “People were buried with nothing. I think there were maybe five clay beads. There were no grave goods whatsoever.”

Even though the project has ended, Stone hopes the work won’t stop.

“We’re really hoping the historians and people like Samuel, who started all this, can maybe establish the property as a heritage site. You have so many rich, family stories about this community. What we found is not the whole story. It just adds to yours,” she said to community members.

“If somebody has a question about the project, they are welcome to contact me. I might not have the answer but I might be able to direct them to one. For now, the torch is passed on to the community.”

Stone can be reached by email at drpkstone@gmail.com.