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November 2007 GW Interns Help Smithsonian Identify Pre-Civil War Corpse as Columbian College Student
By Julia Parmley The 14 GW museum studies graduate students who interned with the Smithsonian Institution’s Anthropology Department of the National Museum of Natural History between 2005 and 2007 expected to work with interesting collections during their internship. They didn’t expect the iron coffin unearthed on the former grounds of GW’s precursor Columbian College and their quest to identify the body within—what they would all call a “once in a lifetime” experience. In April 2005, a cast-iron coffin found by construction workers in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was turned over to the Smithsonian Anthropology Department. Dave Hunt, physical anthropology division collections manager and lecturer for GW’s Department of Anthropology, and Doug Owsley, physical anthropology curator and head of the physical anthropology division, along with a team of anthropologists, pathologists, historical archeologists, and clothing and chemical specialists, began a multidisciplinary study of the coffin and the boy inside. Deborah Hull-Walski, collections manager for the Smithsonian anthropology department and lecturer in GW’s museum studies graduate program, and Randal Scott, M.A. ’05, began to work on identifying the boy from historical and genealogical records. Using historic maps of Columbian College, Scott determined that the coffin had probably been buried in the college cemetery. Further research on the coffin’s distinct design, as well as the boy’s clothing, revealed he was most likely buried between 1850 and 1855, while the pathology and physical anthropology analysis indicated that he had died after a brief illness at approximately 15 years of age. Hull-Walski and the GW interns, former students from her collections management class, then turned to the time-consuming task of identifying the boy. They began their search by looking up death records in the National Intelligencer, a newspaper published in Washington, D.C., from 1800 to 1867. In fall 2005, the name Lemuel Bacon surfaced as a possible fit, and the team began mapping his genealogy. But DNA samples from the boy and a living relative of Bacon’s did not match. In January 2006, another name surfaced as a possible match—that of William Taylor White. The team found someone they thought was a living relative. Again, no DNA match. But Hull-Walski says the team wasn’t ready to give up on White. In spring 2007, they mapped the family tree for a second time. “There was no information about his family, and the census records said he lived with another family, so we had little to go on,” says Hull-Walski. Lauren Hancock, M.A. ’07, spent a considerable amount of time mapping White’s new genealogy, which spanned 37 pieces of paper. “It was addictive,” she says. “You start and you want to keep going. It took a lot of my time and it was frustrating at times, but we solved it.” They contacted Eastern Shore Genealogists in Accomack County, Va., where White was born, and discovered they had misidentified his parents. White was an orphan. Some outside help from researchers M.K. Miles and Gail Walczyk led them to the name of Whitereal father—William A. White—and a second genealogy mapping found a living relative of White, 64-year-old Linda Dwyer of Lancaster, Pa. The DNA was a match. According to historical records, White was born around 1837. He and several of his siblings were appointed a legal guardian by 1845 after the death of both their parents. In 1850, White was living with Ann Custis Taylor, a farmer in Accomack County. Hull-Walski says Taylor left White money for his “maintenance and education” in her will. A 1852 death notice in the Religious Herald, a newspaper published in Richmond, described White as “a youth of much promise” who was well liked by his teachers and classmates “for his amiable disposition and excellent character.” Hull-Walski says GW’s Hunt worked with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in fall 2007 to reconstruct White’s face from a computerized rendering of his skull. “We wanted to have a concept of what William may have looked like and an image to compare with his descendents,” she says. “We couldn’t let go,” says Hull-Walski. “The whole team did the extra work. It was such a great feeling to give William back his name.”
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