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All information gathered by Know Your Family Tree, LLC is used or published solely with the express written consent of our clients. All information presented here has been made in accordance with this consent.
Detailed Life of Agnes Blanche Godward Korstad
| agnes_blanche.pdf |
Detailed Life of James Godward
| james_godward_final.pdf |
Forensic Genealogy
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THE MYSTERY OF THE UNCLAIMED CORPSE
As accustomed as a genealogist is to going back in time in order to find the ancestors of a person, sometimes a genealogist has to go forward in time to find the still-living descendants of a man who has just passed away. This is called Forensic Genealogy, and it involves the kind of detective work that a genealogist does all the time – except that it is going into the future, not the past. Let me explain. In 2005 we were contacted by the Medical Examiner’s office in Seattle, Washington. The previous day, a man had been found dead of unknown causes in a hotel room; his only identification was his driver’s license. The ME had two problems to solve with this case: to find out why the man had died and to locate his next of kin. Neither task turned out to be very easy. We were contacted because of the oddity of the man’s name: he came from Minnesota, our home state, and his last name steered the Coroner’s office to contact people with that same last name in Minnesota. That in turn brought them to an attorney with that same last name to recommend the Coroner to contact us in order to look into the case. The attorney knew we were used to tracking down names; perhaps we could track down this one as well? We had, to start with, a name, a birth date and an address. You would think this would make the project an easy one – but you would be wrong. The address was useless, even fictional. The man had not been in Minnesota for years. This meant that the search was not statewide, but nationwide. Who was this dead man, and who were his next of kin? But before going nationwide, we tried one last approach. If his driver’s license was from Minnesota, then perhaps the man was originally from the state and had simply retained a Minnesota driver’s license long after he had left where he was born. So we scoured statewide birth records for the day of his birth – and found him. As genealogists, this gave us an important piece of information: the names of his parents. They, too, were Minnesotans – and very luckily for us, they were born before 1930, because national census records have a delay mechanism of 70 years before publication. This means that in 2005, the most recent census available to us was from 1930; as today, in 2016, the most recent census available to us is from 1940. The names of his parents gave us two directions to go in: to locate his parents and to locate his siblings. And it was at this point that our search became nationwide, because the parents had left Minnesota and not a single other family member had remained there, either. Everyone had moved elsewhere.This kind of search is called a Migration Analysis – essentially a search for where a family has scattered. We then did a national survey of the parent’s names and the name of his only sibling, a sister. We had a hit in the state of Colorado – but no city or town associated with it. This brought us to search city directories throughout the state of Colorado. After a number of misses, we hit upon the right one, which we confirmed with a White Pages cross search. The dead man’s parent’s were both still alive, as was his only sister, and they were all still living together. We finally had the names, addresses and phone numbers of the next of kin. We immediately passed this information along to the Medical Examiner’s office in Seattle. The whole process took only two days. It felt much longer. What we did not have, however, was any sense of closure beyond that. In fact, the mystery only deepened after we had found the next of kin. There was no obituary published anywhere for the dead man and no mention of him in the Seattle newspapers whatsoever. His next of kin were the only people who acknowledged that he had existed. He seemed to be erased everywhere else. We called the ME’s office but received no explanation as to why the dead man had seemingly vanished. The only thing we did learn is that when you try to contact the ME’s office, he is protected by an entire bureaucracy dedicated to preventing you from speaking with him – unless you say the name of the case you are working on. Then all the doors open. Then The Medical Examiner desperately wants to talk to you. But after the case had been cleared, the doors close again. We never learned how the man died or what he did or where he was buried. It seemed to us that he was born, lived, died – and disappeared. |