Researchers have identified burial sites containing the remains of over 1,000 children on the grounds of, or adjacent to, juvenile reform schools and youth detention centers in 29 states, according to a newly released investigation by Georgetown University's Center for Youth Justice. The findings represent what the center describes as a national legacy of young people who died while in state custody, many of whose names and fates were never recorded in public memory.
The initiative, launched in February, has focused on locating burial grounds connected to 40 reform schools and juvenile detention facilities nationwide. Researchers have paired that archival work with efforts to trace surviving relatives of the deceased children, hoping to notify families who may have spent generations unaware of what happened to their ancestors.
One of the most significant sites identified so far is in Cheltenham, Maryland, where about 230 Black boys are buried. The graves sit in a wooded area across the street from the former House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, a facility that operated from 1870 until 1937. The burial ground lies next to the Maryland Veterans Cemetery, a stark juxtaposition of the honored and the forgotten.
For Veronica Spears, the research brought an unexpected and painful revelation. She recounted to NPR that when she opened a letter from the researchers, she began to tremble. Her husband asked what was wrong, but she said she could not immediately find the words. The letter informed her that her grandfather had a brother who had been committed to a reform institution and died there at just 12 years old — a family member she had never known existed.
Spears' family is among 16 families that researchers have connected to children who died at the Cheltenham facility. Her great-uncle is now counted among the Black youths who perished while held at the institution. The cemetery where he lies is located in the wooded area across from the facility, a site that remained largely unknown to descendants until the center's outreach began.
The House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children was part of a broader system of segregated juvenile institutions that emerged in the United States after the Civil War. Such facilities were often established to house Black children separately from white juveniles, and conditions in them were frequently overcrowded, underfunded and poorly documented. The Cheltenham facility's long period of operation, spanning nearly seven decades, means that many children lived and died there without any formal accounting of their deaths.
The discovery of the graves raises difficult questions about record-keeping and accountability in America's juvenile justice system. Experts note that reform schools were often designed to be self-contained institutions, isolated from public view, which allowed deaths and burials to go unrecorded or minimally documented. For families, the lack of information compounded the trauma of losing a child, sometimes leaving them with no knowledge of where their loved one was buried or even that they had died in custody.
The Georgetown center's Forgotten Children Initiative aims to fill that void. Researchers are combing through institutional records, death certificates, cemetery plots and genealogical databases to identify the children and locate their living relatives. The work is painstaking, and the center acknowledges that the true number of graves could be far higher than the 1,000 already confirmed, since many facilities left incomplete or entirely missing records.
The initiative's national scope — covering 29 states — indicates that the practice of burying children near the institutions where they died was widespread, not confined to a single region or era. The largest burial site identified so far is the one near the House of Reformation, now the location of the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, underscoring how the same land has been used for youth confinement across generations.
For the families being contacted, the news arrives with mixed emotions. Spears described the discovery as both shocking and meaningful, giving her family a piece of history that had been erased. Researchers say such notifications are handled with care, often involving genealogists and counselors who can help relatives process information that may reopen old wounds or fill long-standing gaps in their family trees.
The findings also carry implications for how states and institutions acknowledge their past. Some advocates argue that the burial sites should be preserved, marked and made accessible to descendants, and that the children's names should be formally recorded. Others call for broader investigations into the conditions that led to so many deaths, including disease outbreaks, malnutrition and violence that were common in under-resourced juvenile facilities.
The center has not yet released a full list of the 40 facilities under review, but it says its work is ongoing and that additional graves and family connections are expected to be announced as research progresses. The project's organizers emphasize that time is a factor, since many relatives who might remember these children are elderly, and archival records continue to deteriorate.
The Cheltenham site, with its 230 graves, stands as a particularly vivid example of what researchers are uncovering nationwide. The forested plot across from a veterans cemetery holds the remains of boys who were committed to a reform institution and never returned home, their stories largely absent from official histories until now. For families like Spears', the letter from Georgetown was the first step toward reclaiming a name, a relation and a memory that had been lost for generations.
The Forgotten Children Initiative continues to seek information from the public and to work with state agencies, historical societies and community groups. Its researchers say the ultimate goal is not only to identify the dead but to ensure that the living — the descendants and communities affected — can decide how these burial sites should be remembered and honored.
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