After Years Lost, Identity Reclaimed

Hull-Walski said: "We wanted to know who he was. We just wanted to give him a name."

In the spring, she found a crucial clue. Searching through a computer database of the Washington Intelligencer, she stumbled on another notice of the death of William T. White. But it wasn't an obituary.

It was a heartfelt "resolution" drawn up by his college friends, expressing their anguish at the loss of one who "was bound to us by the tenderest ties of friendship." Somehow it had not turned up in prior research, but it reinforced to Hull-Walski that, despite the DNA, William T. White had to be the coffin boy. She showed the notice to Scott. "It's him," she told her colleague. But where had they gone wrong?

"So we started again," Hull-Walski said. She appealed to colleagues on the Eastern Shore, where White was born, explaining the problem and asking for help.

She soon got it. A local genealogist called her with the news that the Levin White she thought was William's father, and whose family tree she had traced, was from a different White clan.

There was the research mistake, Hull-Walski realized, and that's why the DNA didn't match. "It was a relief," she said.

Yet it still didn't tell her who the boy's father was. Without that knowledge, no descendants could be traced, and no modern DNA could be checked.

Then more help came. Two acquaintances visiting an Accomack records office found an 1850 court document that referred to White's status as an orphan -- and listed the name of his deceased father, William A. White.

"Bingo," Hull-Walski said.

The team quickly traced the family and located Dwyer in Lancaster. Hull-Walski and a colleague went to visit Dwyer Aug. 1, and took the DNA swab in a quiet corner of a Denny's restaurant.

The comparison, performed for free by Mitotyping Technologies, of State College, Pa., came through a week or so later.

The DNA matched. And the orphaned youngster from a bygone time finally had his identity back.

"You just kind of tear up," Hull-Walski said. "It just felt so good. It felt so doggone good."