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WORLD / America
Mystery boy in iron coffin identified
(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-09-20 16:48
Washington - Researchers have solved the mystery of the boy in the iron
coffin.
The cast-iron coffin was discovered by utility workers in Washington two
years ago. Smithsonian scientists led by forensic anthropologist Doug
Owsley set about trying to determine who was buried in it, so the body
could be placed in a new, properly marked grave.
In this photograph provided by the Smithsonian Institution,
anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide, right, and Doug Owsley, head of physical
anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, center, examine
the remains of an iron coffin at the museum in Washington in this Aug. 3,
2005 file photo.[AP]
The body was that of 15-year-old William Taylor White, who died in 1852
and was buried in the Columbia College cemetery, they announced Thursday.
"The mystery of this young boy's life and a strong sense of
responsibility to properly identify him kept me and the entire team
focused and determined. This was not a one-person project. It took more
than three dozen people nearly two years to make the ID," Deborah
Hull-Walski, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of
Natural History, said in a statement.
The researchers believe that the coffin was inadvertently left behind
when the cemetery was later moved.
White, from Accomack, Va., was a descendant of Anthony West, one of the
Jamestown settlers, they announced. He was a student in the preparatory
school of the college, which later became George Washington University.
White was one of several potential candidates the team focused on after
studying census records, obituaries and other public documents.
They then tested the DNA of known living descendants to make the positive
identification.
The pathologists and forensic anthropologists reported that White had
congenital heart disease, a ventricular septum defect, which is a hole in
the heart, that contributed to his death.
They found an obituary published in the Daily National Intelligencer
newspaper of Washington on Jan. 28, 1852, confirming White died Jan. 24,
1852, after a short illness.
Clothing historians were able to determine that he was dressed in a
shirt, vest and pants that are consistent with clothing styles of the
early to mid-1850s.
"Thus is cut off, in the morning of his days, one in whom many hopes were
centred-and who had the fairest prospects of happiness and usefulness in
life," the Religious Herald newspaper of Richmond, Va., said in its
obituary.
The cast-iron coffin was shaped a bit like an Egyptian mummy case and is
of a type called Fisk style patented in 1848. This particular model was
popular in the early 1850s among the well-to-do, Owsley said.
Because they are sealed, cast iron coffins tend to yield well-preserved
bodies. Indeed, the young person looked not unlike an ancient mummy, even
though he had not gone through the Egyptian embalming procedures.
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