Their remains sat, unmarked, in shallow graves at the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Va., for decades. Now, some 150 years after the Civil War, the bodies of 40 Confederate soldiers discovered over the past two months will receive a proper memorial. 
 
 "It's been very meaningful to us to find these spots, identify these soldiers and bring closure to families," said Ted Delaney, the cemetery's assistant director, who, along with a team of archaeologists, uncovered the exact resting place of some 40 Confederate soldiers as well as the plots where Union soldiers were once buried and later exhumed. 
 
 Delaney told FoxNews.com that, beginning in April, the team dug a 45-by-10-foot trench within "Yankee Square" at the cemetery where they found a mix of red and orange squares, which they determined were Confederate soldiers' graves. He said 35 to 40 graves were found during this latest search and that 50 were uncovered in the same area last year. 
 
 Delaney said he is now tasked with identifying each soldier's grave and giving it the tribute it deserves. 
 
 "Our goal is to put a marker at each grave space to identify the soldier and note when he died and his military unit," said Delaney, who is optimistic about the project because, "the undertaker's notes are so detailed and complete." 
 
 He said that when all is done, about 80 Confederate soldiers will be properly identified. He noted that the remains of Union soldiers were exhumed and removed from the plot of land in 1866. 
 
 "This has been an incredible process of discovery," he said. "It’s always been very frustrating for those descendants who come to us because they can't find their ancestor's grave. Now we can bring some of them closure." 
 
 The task to identify and maintain the graves of Civil War soldiers at the cemetery began in April 2013. Delaney and his team are receiving an annual $2,500 grant from the Virginia Department of Historic Records Work to document unknown graves within "Yankee Square," which was first intended as a burial site for Union soldiers and then came to include Confederate soldiers -- many of whom died from diseases such as small pox. 
 
 Delaney's crew is not the first to uncover unidentified Civil War graves in recent years. 
 
 Sam Ricks, who works as graves registrar for the Sons of Confederate Veterans' Pennsylvania Division, has long been on a quest to restore the graves of America's bravest. Ricks and his team are responsible for uncovering unmarked graves at Mount Moriah cemetery, an estimated 380-acre historic graveyard straddling Philadelphia and Yeadon, Pa., and the state's largest -- where 2,300 Navy service members and Marines dating from the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 all the way to the Korean and Vietnam wars are buried. 
 
 In 2007, Ricks received an unusual request, which led him to a discovery that was "like finding a needle in a haystack." 
 
 Ricks was approached by a descendant of Nathan Tiernon Walton, a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute who, along with 294 other cadets, fought the Battle of New Market in Virginia for the Confederate Army on May 15, 1864. The battle is well-known to Civil War historians because the small Confederate Army, which consisted largely of the teenage cadets from VMI, defeated the Union soldiers and forced them out of the Shenandoah Valley. 
 
 Walton later became estranged from his family when he left his wife and daughter in Baltimore to find work in Atlanta and later Philadelphia, according to Ricks. 
 
 "He was a recluse," Ricks said, "And no one ever knew what became of him." 
 
 It was long believed by the family that Walton was buried in Baltimore, alongside his wife. But that theory was discounted when Walton's great-grandson, Bill Banks, visited Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore and found no evidence Walton was buried there. 
 
 Banks was on a quest that began 100 years ago with his grandmother, Walton's daughter, who handed down a large cast iron Southern Cross of Honor grave marker to be placed at her father's grave if it was ever found. 
 
 It was later discovered that Walton died in Philadelphia during the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, leading Ricks to eventually find his unmarked grave on Memorial Day in 2008 at Philadelphia Memorial Park in Frazer, Pa. 
 
 In November 2008, Ricks, as well as descendants of Walton, were finally able to mark his grave 90 years after his death with the cross passed down by his daughter. 
 
 "I'm reminded of this case every Memorial Day," Ricks said. "Walton's daughter had handed down to generations a marker to be placed at his grave should it ever be found. And then we actually did it. We fulfilled her wish." ||||| Photo 
 
 They have been bulldozed over by shopping centers, crept over by weeds and forgotten by time. Across the country, from Lower Manhattan to the Deep South, are unmarked slave burial sites, often discovered only by chance or by ignominious circumstance as when construction crews accidentally exhume bodies when building a shopping mall. 
 
 Compounding the problem of preserving and locating slave graveyards, there is no comprehensive list of where they are and who lies within them. The situation troubled Sandra Arnold, 50, a history student at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies at Fordham University, who traces her ancestry to slaves in Tennessee. 
 
 “The fact that they lie in these unmarked abandoned sites,” Ms. Arnold said, “it’s almost like that they are kind of vanishing from the American consciousness.” 
 
 Last month, Fordham introduced Ms. Arnold’s proposed solution, the Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans, a Web portal that invites visitors to input information about the whereabouts and residents of slave graveyards across the country. The goal is to create a user-generated database of these sites all over the United States. 
 
 Though there are other similar projects, most are conducted on a regional level, or do not focus specifically on places slaves were buried. Find a Grave, a database used by many tombstone hobbyists and amateur genealogists, lists hundreds of thousands of plots, including those belonging to slaves. In 2001, in an effort to avoid disturbing burial grounds during a property boom, Prince William County in Virginia began collecting locations. There are also private initiatives in Maryland to catalog all of the estimated 6,000 to 9,000 slave burial sites in the state. 
 
 But still slave graveyards risk being trampled by time and construction. One of the most notable examples was in Lower Manhattan, where construction of a federal office building was halted in 1991 after the discovery of bones 24 feet below the surface. Just 419 bodies were discovered, though estimates of how many free and enslaved blacks were buried there range from 10,000 to 20,000. The African Burial Ground, as it was named, is now a national historic landmark. 
 
 Just last year, construction was held up for a new Walmart in Florence, Ala., after local residents protested that it would encroach on hidden burial sites. 
 
 “There is certainly a very important national need; it’s more than just an academic exercise,” said Lynn Rainville, a research professor at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and an adviser to the database. 
 
 For Ms. Arnold it is also personal. The idea was born two years ago after she visited a Tennessee cemetery where her great-grandfather, who was born a slave, is buried. It was adrift in the middle of a field, she said, hardly the hallowed space that cemeteries typically are. “The fact that enslaved African-Americans don’t have that sort of dignity,” she said, “it bothered me.” 
 
 The project’s ambition — to be a comprehensive database for the country — is hampered because slaves were often perfunctorily buried, and because of a historical quirk: headstones were a luxury in many Southern areas, and both enslaved and free people were often buried with plain stone markers or none at all. 
 
 “A huge number of old cemeteries, even from the 19th century, are simply lost in the landscape,” Eric G. Grundset, the director of the Library of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, who has traveled the country researching the legacy of blacks in the war, said in an e-mail. “Memory is usually the primary source for locating such spots, so this project will rely very heavily on that for results.” 
 
 The database is still in its infancy, with just over a dozen entries uploaded since it began about a month ago. Irma Watkins-Owens, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Fordham, is a co-director, along with advisers from Yale, Emory University and the College of William and Mary. 
 
 Ms. Arnold, who also works as a secretary for the African studies department at Fordham, said it was entirely dependent upon word of mouth for contributions. Researchers with reams of information may find the system somewhat unwieldy since it requires data to be inputted piece by piece. 
 
 Still, the news of the database excited preservationists like Lisa Martin Sanders for its potential. Two years ago, Ms. Sanders rediscovered and began to rehabilitate a rundown cemetery where her ancestors and an estimated 1,500 other slaves and free black people were buried in Sanford, N.C., now called the Black Heritage Community Cemetery. She is working on her next. 
 
 “I thought it was awfully sad that people can get thrown away,” Ms. Sanders said. “If we have somewhere we can go and actually look and research this information, we can better understand who we are,” she added. “If we lose that, where are we?”
– Archaeologists have in the last two months uncovered the unmarked graves of as many as 40 Confederate soldiers in Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Va. That adds to the tally of about 50 unmarked Confederate graves found in the same part of the cemetery last year—a section known as Yankee Square that was originally created as a place to bury Union soldiers, though their remains were exhumed and moved in 1866, Fox News reports. The team's goal is to match up the graves with the "detailed" undertaker's notes that were made at the time, allowing the archaeologists to identify the soldiers buried there with markers noting each man's military unit and when he died. “It’s always been an unsatisfying answer for me to say, 'We know your ancestor is here somewhere, but we don't know exactly where,’” the cemetery’s assistant director told the News & Advance earlier this month. The graves are shallow ones, and the team has only needed to dig about 10 inches below the surface—not to the point of reaching a body, but until a red clay patch appears amid the orange dirt. The red clay indicates the presence of a body, as the deeper, darker dirt that was dug out to create the graves was often used to cover the body. "We can see any time that a hole or disturbance is put in the ground because the soil’s not the same," says one team member. The team has also determined that that crisp outlines of the graves indicate that they haven't been disturbed since they were made. But it did make two mysterious discoveries: some graves were placed perpendicularly over older graves, and others had a circle-shaped brown patch on top of them—perhaps the remnants of a patch of flowers. (Read about how archaeologists managed to uncover graves the Nazis tried to hide.)