His name was Lewis Taulman, or maybe Taubman. The barely readable headstone says the boy died 12 days after his first birthday, but not when. The graves of John Brown, who died at age 20 on Aug. 31, 1836, and his sister Sarah once lay nearby.

Tucked away in a police impound lot, the headstones came from the only graves with any identification out of 25 moved for a road-widening project. Working with little information, historians and anthropology students are trying to identify the occupants of the relocated graves, which date to the early 1800s.

No descendants have come forward, despite legal ads placed by the city before the graves were dug up this spring and summer in this Cincinnati suburb.

Specialists who excavated the site recovered bits of bone and small parts of items that could include buttons, city Service Director Dennis Albrinck said Monday. What little was found of the remains was taken to a University of Cincinnati anthropology laboratory several months ago for analysis, he said.

The remains are to be reburied elsewhere in the spring, Albrinck said.

City officials obtained a judge's permission to relocate the graves and hired an archaeologist, Jeannine Kreinbrink, to ensure that the remains would be preserved and handled with respect. She is working with University of Cincinnati anthropology students on the mystery.

Fourteen of the 25 relocated graves were for small children. Several of the markers were merely field stones, perhaps placed there by a family with little means to pinpoint burial locations.

Bev Mussari, president of the Blue Ash Historical Society, said she has no idea what role they played among the region's earliest families. She had mixed feelings about unearthing the graves, but didn't want to miss the opportunity to learn more about the past.

"I thought if it's not done now, who's to say in the future that anyone would want to do this?" she said.

The graves were at the very edge of a marked 2-acre graveyard, the Carpenter's Run Pioneer Cemetery, which dates to the turn of the 19th century.

Historians had believed it belonged solely to Carpenter's Run Baptist Church, which was founded in 1797. But anthropology students who began studying the cemetery a year ago found in the 1850 census that the land also was used by a church called St. Anthony's.

The students located the graves using ground-penetrating radar and are mapping the cemetery and researching its history. It will take some time to identify who was buried there, anthropology professor Alan Sullivan said.

"We might ultimately be able to identify a lot of these people. But it takes a lot of research," Sullivan said.

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