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." ||||| A lost medieval cemetery discovered under Cambridge University contained graves that had been pre-dug in anticipation of winter deaths, archaeologists have discovered. 
 
 The huge graveyard was found during excavations beneath the Old Divinity School at St John's College during recent refurbishments. 
 
 The mass cemetery, which was far larger than the small burial ground which archaeologists had expected, contained around about 1,300 burials, including about 400 complete skeletons. 
 
 And experts made the sinister discovery that many of the skeletons did not fit their graves. 
 
 An Archaeological Journal report on the excavation said: “This suggests that some, but not all of the graves may have been dug in advance of being needed. 
 
 “One possibility is that this occurred prior to the winter, when ground conditions would have potentially made digging graves considerably more difficult.” 
 
 One skeleton found in a grave which was too big for the body 
 
 The bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the medieval Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which St John's College takes its name. 
 
 Craig Cessford, from the university's department of archaeology and anthropology, said it was one of the largest finds of its kind in the UK. 
 
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 Although the existence and location of the cemetery have been known to historians since at least the mid-twentieth century, the sheer scale and extent of the burial ground was unclear until now. 
 
 The vast majority of burials were without coffins, many even without shrouds, suggesting the cemetery was primarily used to serve the poor. 
 
 There were very few bodies belonging to women and children - probably because its main purpose was to cater for "poor scholars and other wretched persons" and pregnant women were excluded from its care. 
 
 Grave-goods such as jewellery and personal items were only present in a handful of burials but they included a jet crucifix and the head of a woman. 
 
 A crucifix found in one of the graves 
 
 Dr Cessford said: "Evidence for clothing and grave-goods is rarer than at most hospital cemeteries. 
 
 "This is principally because this was a purely lay graveyard with no clerics present. 
 
 "Items were found in graves that might represent grave-goods, but their positions were ambiguous and it is equally possible that they represent residual material from earlier activity at the site." 
 
 Originally a small building on a patch of waste ground, the hospital grew with church support to be a noted place of hospitality and care for both university scholars and local people. 
 
 Archaeologists working at Cambridge 
 
 Despite local rumours linking the hospital cemetery to the Black Death, no evidence of this disease was found on any of the remains and the team did not find any sign of large burial groups from that period of the 14th century. 
 
 In later centuries, plague victims in Cambridge were buried on local grazing land such as Midsummer Common, and it is likely that the same locations were used in the medieval period as well. 
 
 Most of the bodies were buried in neatly laid-out rows or deposited in a building on the site. 
 
 The cemetery was found to have had gravel paths and a water well, along with seeds from various flowering plants, suggesting that much like today's cemeteries, it was a place for people to come and visit their deceased loved ones. 
 
 The bodies surprisingly did not exhibit many serious illnesses and conditions that would have required medical attention. 
 
 The graveyard was found during the refurbishment of St John's College at Cambridge University
– 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.)