Category
Interesting Cases
Re-identification of the Titanic’s Unknown Child
On April 15, 1912, the Royal Mail Ship Titanic sank after striking an iceberg. Only 712 of the 2209 passengers survived. Within days of the disaster, the Mackay-Bennett wa...
Ancient DNA is a Powerful Tool for Studying the Past – When Archaeologists and Geneticists Work Together
Written by: Elizabeth Sawchuk, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York) and Mary Prendergast, Saint Louis University – Madrid DNA has moved beyon...
The Monster of Durrës
On October 11, 2012, an 18 year-old girl was found murdered and decapitated in the Durrës District of Albania. The victim, Ajshe Vata, was a good and honest girl who had a re...
Giving Names to the Victims of the Ardeatine Massacre
On the outskirts of Rome, Italy lies Fosse Ardeatine (the Ardeatine Caves). If you were to visit on March 24th, you’d hear a role call of 335 names being called out to remem...
Is it the Blood of Louis XVI?
The ill-fated Louis XVI was a French king who was famously beheaded along with his wife, Marie-Antoinette, during the French Revolution in 1793. Witnesses to the execution dip...
DNA Typing Confirms Bronze Age Mix-and-Match Burials
Archaeologists have made an interesting discovery while excavating the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age settlement named Cladh Hallan on the island of South Uist in the Oute...
The Killer of Little Shepherds
Douglas Starr, Professor of Science Journalism at Boston University, tells the story of the people who invented forensic science, the first criminal profile, and the first ser...
Raised as Paul Fronczak, Genetic Genealogy Uncovers His True Identity
Paul Fronczak spent his life wondering if he was a baby who’d been kidnapped from a Chicago hospital. As an adult, DNA tests confirmed that detectives had gotten it wrong. C...
Solving the Phoenix Canal Murders
Colleen Fitzpatrick, founder of Identifinders International, describes how she used forensic genealogy to narrow a list of 2,000 suspects to just 5 and helped the Phoenix PD c...