Detective Sergeant Brian Haars from the Henry County Sheriff’s Office sat down with RegionalMediaNews in November to walk through the steps to upload your DNA profile and become a “Genetic Witness,” which will help police departments find family for unidentified persons like the Geneseo DNA Doe from 1966. Once you have completed a DNA kit, such as Ancestry, and received your results, you can upload a text file of your DNA profile. The police do not have access to your full DNA profile on GED Match. Create a new account on GED Match, extract your DNA Profile, and upload it to GED Match. It’s simple and safe, and you may help bring home an unidentified person.
This is the case in LaSalle County that was solved: https://www.regionalmedianews.com/news/local/ And here is a case solved in Grundy County from DNA Doe: https://dnadoeproject.org/case/grundy-county-jane-doe/.
When the current members of the Henry County Sheriff’s Office discovered an unsolved case from 1966 with an unidentified victim, they looked into options that would allow them to return this man home to his family. This begins the most recent work to identify the man and find his family. The Henry County Sheriff’s Office was able to secure funding from the Henry County State’s Attorney’s Office to help pay the fee for DNA Doe, which covered the majority of the fee. The fee for DNA Doe covers the costs associated with compiling a DNA sample and the research gathered from ancestry sites and obituaries to build a family tree for the unidentified person. The DNA Doe Project is a non-profit agency that functions from fundraisers, donors, and the fees from DNA sequencing. The DNA Doe Project requires a DNA sample to compile its own DNA profile. Dr. Trevor Craig from Geneseo Family Dental offered his services at no cost to remove two teeth from the skull for DNA sequencing by the lab at the DNA Doe Project. The DNA Doe Project used reports from the FBI and the University of Iowa to determine how to best acquire a viable DNA sample from the human remains recovered. Dr. Trevor Craig extracted two teeth, and those teeth were sent to the DNA Doe Project. Once the DNA Doe Project lab develops a DNA sample, they will start building a family tree. If they find a potential relative, they will call the Henry County Sheriff’s Office before they call the possible relative. Detective Haars said the Sheriff’s Office would likely take a DNA sample from the potential relative to confirm a familial match for a final confirmation on the identity of the unidentified male. The Henry County Sheriff’s Office possesses a liquid and powder form of DNA from the unidentified male.
There are currently 25,096 missing persons in NamUs, with 17,007 listed as unidentified and 17,868 listed as unclaimed. You can help reunite families with their loved ones by following a few simple steps that take you no more than 15 minutes. Go to GedMatch.com, create a free account, and then click on the drop-down menu and select “Upload DNA.” There are simple step-by-step instructions to upload your DNA from whichever ancestry websites you have previously used. Select “Opt-In” to allow your DNA profile to be used to identify these lost loved ones, return them to their families, and give them a proper funeral. You can choose the level of security on your DNA profile. You can choose private, public opt-out to allow your profile to be compared against unidentified persons, and public opt-in to allow your profile to be compared against unidentified persons and violent crimes.
The DNA Doe Project was founded in 2017 as a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation with a simple humanitarian mission: to identify John and Jane Doe using investigative genetic genealogy. On March 5, 2018, they solved their first case – Robert Ivan Nichols, the John Doe previously known as Joseph Newton Chandler III. On April 11, 2018, they joined local authorities at a press conference in Troy, Ohio, to identify the young woman known as ‘Buckskin Girl’ as Marcia L. King – the first time in history that the world learned of the power of investigative genetic genealogy to solve cold case identifications.
National Missing and Unidentified Persons System – NamUs
On October 27, 1966, a local Geneseo mail carrier and trapper was walking along a ditch on the Robert Stahl farm when he found a human skull, which started a decades-long search to find the man’s identity. To this day, the land remains in the Robert Stahl family. In 1966, Interstate 80 was not completed between Bureau County and the Quad Cities area. The location is half a mile south of Interstate 80, which wasn’t completed in 1966. The main thoroughfare was Highway 6 in 1966, and the remains were found about a mile off Highway 6. Initially, a human skull was found near Cat Creek, which is southeast of Geneseo. The skull was sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in Quantico in October 1966. A further search of the area recovered additional skeletal remains. The FBI determined the cause of death was a bullet to the back of the head. A search in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) produced no persons reported missing in our area during the estimated time of death. The man is estimated to have died one to five years earlier, or approximately 1961 to 1965. They did not recover all the remains of Geneso John Doe 1966, so they estimate his height to be 5’5″ to 5’10” and between 16 and 30 years old. Based on the color of the bones, some of the bones were submerged in water at one time.
The remains were sent back to the FBI in 2016 for additional testing and analysis not available in 1966. Following additional analysis by the FBI, the remains went to the University of Iowa, who confirmed the FBI’s findings.