Earlier this month, an unusual sight was seen in Uptown Kingston — a yellow tent appeared in Old Dutch Church’s ancient cemetery. Inside, an archaeological site was being explored.

On July 13, Dr. Joseph Diamond, associate professor of anthropology at SUNY New Paltz and one of the area’s leading archaeologists, and his students began a dig on an unmarked mass grave. The team is looking to uncover anywhere from five to dozens of remains stacked on top of one another and forgotten for centuries.

Old Dutch Church houses one of the longest continually practicing congregations in America, dating back to 1659. Its grounds served as a burial site for 17th- and 18th-century Dutch and English settlers. As a center also for life within the Wiltwyck settlement, where now the Stockade District sits. A National Historic Landmark, the church has received over the centuries prominent visitors including George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and members of the Dutch royal family. Former governor, U.S. vice president and Revolutionary War general George Clinton is buried there, among many other early Kingstonians.

The exhumation is the result of three years of preparation by Gage and Justin DeWitt, who hail from Louisiana and Kentucky, respectively. The two are ninth cousins and descendants of Tjerck DeWitt, a Dutch colonist who died in 1700 in Kingston and is believed to be buried next to the Old Dutch Church. DeWitt, a common surname in America, is shared by many descendants of Tjerck DeWitt and his wife Barbara Andrieszen.

Gage and Justin met a few years ago on a Facebook page dedicated to sharing the history of their family name. The two connected online and began consolidating resources and information. They eventually founded the Dewitt Family Historical Society.

A family Bible inscribed by Andries DeWitt, Tjerck’s son was found which provided the two with an account of Andries’ father’s death, including his place of burial — “the church in Kingston.” Documentation then surfaced which stated that Andries DeWitt was buried atop his father. Andries DeWitt’s headstone served as a marker and led to another critical discovery: a photograph Gage and Justin DeWitt believe was taken before the civil war which shows a missing wooden post behind Andries DeWitt’s headstone.

"Crosses, headstones, those were English traditions," Justin DeWitt said. "The Dutch would bury their dead in a family plot with a wooden pole in the middle and they would bury their family around it in a star pattern." Justin added that the frugal Dutch would conserve cemetery space by stacking the burials; sometimes, he said, as many as 40 in a single location.

As a result of this tradition, there could be a number of unmarked sets of human remains buried there. Diamond and his students hope to finish the dig by August 11.

Then Dr. Kenneth Nystrom, assistant professor of anthropology at SUNY New Paltz, will take the remains found and reassemble them to determine their gender, age and other details. DNA samples will then be collected to identify the remains. The whole study is estimated to take two to three years to complete; the remains will then be reburied with permanent grave markers.

“We don’t want to rush this. This is an extremely rare opportunity so if we have the remains in a controlled environment at the university, we want many people who are experts in various fields to analyze the remains,” Gage DeWitt said. Among things they hope to learn are what diseases they had and what kinds of foods they ate. “We’ll even take soil samples from around the remains to find any kind of biological material that was in their stomachs when they died.”

Though this project has a personal connection for Gage and Justin, another goal is to retell the heavily anglicized version of American history typically taught and raise awareness of early Dutch settlement in the Hudson Valley and elsewhere.

“There are tens of thousands of people who are descendants of these two individuals [Tjerck DeWitt and Barbara Andrieszen] and there are a lot of people that came down maternal lines that don’t carry the DeWitt name and may not know they’re tied into some of the most interesting people in North American history,” Gage said. “There are a lot of things we do every day without realizing they’re a direct result of our Dutch ancestry. Here locally in New York it’s not so much of an issue, but I’m from Louisiana and nobody even knows there was a Dutch colony in North America.”

Gage and Justin credit the Old Dutch Church with taking great care of and responsibility for maintaining Kingston's history and said they’ve gotten a lot of support from the community in their quest for ancestral knowledge.

“When you hear about a guy from Kentucky and a guy from Louisiana showing up here to exhume their ancestors, you think of a couple of hillbillies showing up in a truck and a couple of shovels,” Justin joked.