In 1977, workers building a highway in the state of Maryland, in the United States, came across an abandoned cemetery in the middle of the forest. In the unmarked graves there were mainly women and children. The oldest ones dated back to the 18th century. They were the black slaves of the Catoctin furnace, a nearby iron foundry. Now, in an unprecedented study, the DNA extracted from 27 of those corpses has made it possible to know their history, specify their place of origin in Africa and find tens of thousands of current relatives, including almost 3,000 direct descendants; something impossible until now, since in that country blacks were not included in the national census until 1870.
