After Years Lost, Identity Reclaimed

It seemed perfect.

The museum had the samples of the coffin boy's mitochondrial DNA, which Smithsonian experts said can be traced and matched via female descendants over many generations. Hull-Walski and Scott developed a Bacon family tree and located a descendant in Texas. But when the descendant's DNA was compared with the boy's, it did not match.

Neither researcher was surprised. It was too easy.

Another apparent breakthrough followed. The Jan. 28, 1852, edition of the Intelligencer carried a brief obituary for a William Taylor White, of Accomack, who had died "at college hill" four days earlier.

The researchers obtained a digest of old wills for Accomack County and found one in which a guardian had left White money for his education. This time, Scott said, "we really felt like we had the right person."

The same digest contained the will of a Levin White, who had a son named William T., and who the researchers figured must have been the boy's late father. "It matched up beautifully," Scott said. But when a descendant of Levin White was located in Baltimore, to the experts' surprise, her DNA did not match. "That was devastating," Scott said.

But they had one more prime candidate. The team had also found an obituary for a William Henry White, who had died Sept. 29, 1852, at the age of 14. There was no connection to the college, but the boy's father, Mathias, had been a Pennsylvania Avenue undertaker who used Fisk and Raymond coffins.

Again a descendant was traced, this time to suburban Maryland. But again the DNA did not match.

It was now summer 2006, and the team had been working on the case for a year. The boy's body was being preserved at the museum, where it remained yesterday, awaiting final disposition, encased in a white body bag inside a metal cooler. But the researchers appeared no closer to knowing his name.

"What do we do now?" Hull-Walski said they thought.

Yet they remained determined.

"He'd been left behind that initial time," Scott said. "It wasn't going to happen again."