Mystery solved: identity of child’s body revealed

A young girl has been identified a year after her perfectly preserved body was found in a coffin.

In May 2016, builders working on a family home in San Francisco unearthed a beautifully constructed casket containing a child’s body. With no note of her name, the medical examiner and coffin design revealed she had been buried for roughly 145 years.

The Garden of Innocence, an organisation that looks after the remains of unidentified children, stepped in to give the girl – who was given the temporary name Miranda Eve – a proper resting place, as featured in the June 2016 issue of SAIFInsight.

12 months later, researchers have been able confirm that Miranda Eve was Edith Howard Cook, the second born daughter of Horatio Nelson and Edith Scooffy Cook. She died on October 13, 1876, at the age of two years, 10 months and 15 days and had been buried in the family plot of the town cemetery.

The cemetery was closed in 1902 and the interred were exhumed and transferred to another location. For unknown reasons, Edith was left behind.

Six steadfast volunteers calling themselves Team Miranda, with information garnered from 34 additional researchers, which included retired police officers who specialise in cold cases, worked tirelessly on this case.

Elissa Davey, the group’s founder, said: “The research effort was complex, consisting of phases which often overlapped. A successful completion of each was needed to obtain a 100% positive identification.”

They started with the original casket, which was made of metal, 37 inches in length with two viewing windows in the lid. The style was easily distinguishable from other caskets of the era and the makers were quickly identified.

DNA also played a crucial role in solving the mystery. Funeral director Enrique Reade pulled strands of hair, which were sent to Jelmer Eerkens, Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis, for analysis and sequencing, before the girl was reburied.

The results showed that Edith began experiencing undernourishment approximately three months before her death. When they uncovered her cemetery plot details, the linked funeral home records indicated the cause of death as marasmum, a term used in the 1800s for severe undernourishment, and it is most likely an infectious disease caused her marasmus.

The team even tracked down a direct descendant of the Cook and Scooffy families. Peter Cook agreed to provide a DNA sample and it provided to be the final step in formal identification of Miranda. Peter is the grandnephew of Edith and the grandson of her brother Milton.

When the investigation started, The Garden of Innocence held a service at Greenlawn Memorial Park in San Francisco to lay the child to rest.

As SAIFInsight revealed in issue 177, the group worked tirelessly to handcraft her a new coffin.

Elissa said: “I spent the weekend at my sister’s All Star Custom Cabinets shop in Torrance, California, helping to build a casket to place Miranda and her current casket in.

“It took us 18 hours to build, but my family, Jana and Larry Cooper, their son, Kevin Cooper and daughter, Tracey Huebner are professional builders.

“The children that come to The Garden of Innocence are no longer abandoned, we have them. We invite the communities to their service as these children belong to all of you now and we are a family.”

As SAIFInsight went to print, a second memorial service was planned in honour of Edith Howard Cook on June 10 at her graveside in Greenlawn Memorial Park.

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