NO LONGER FORGOTTEN
Remains of girl found in a casket below home belonged to daughter of prominent San Francisco family
Her remarkably well-preserved body was discovered in an elaborate coffin buried in a pricey San Francisco neighborhood.
There were no markings to say who she was. Her curly locks were laced with sprigs of lavender. A rosary and eucalyptus seeds had been placed on her chest.
Over the last year, a team of scientists, amateur sleuths and history buffs — using DNA samples and historical documents — worked to solve this Bay Area mystery: Who was the little girl in the casket?
This week, they announced their answer: Edith Howard Cook.
Born in San Francisco on Nov. 28, 1873, the daughter of Horatio Nelson Cook and Edith Scooffy Cook died of marasmus — a form of severe malnourishment that can be brought on by viral, bacterial or parasitic infections — a month shy of her third birthday.
According to Jelmer Eerkens, a UC Davis archaeologist who analyzed Edith’s hair, chemical isotopes
showed she essentially wasted away.
Where did researchers begin?
The airtight metal casket was unearthed from beneath a garage in San Francisco’s Richmond District, where an Odd Fellows cemetery once was located.
After determining that it was more than 140 years old, the team went looking for a map of the cemetery from the approximate time the casket was buried.
They found one, dated 1865, at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. By overlaying that map and other historical sketches of the cemetery onto a map of the current-day neighborhood and examining cemetery records, researchers narrowed the girl’s identity down to two prime candidates.
The amateur genealogists then went over centuries of census, birth, marriage, property and death records to trace each candidate’s family tree. The effort took three people about 3,000 hours, said Elissa Davey, who spearheaded the search for the girl’s identity.
“I knew this day would come because I knew we wouldn’t give up on her,” Davey said.
Bob Phillips, a retired federal employee who volunteered his genealogy skills to the search, traced Edith Cook’s family from the 1600s to modern times. He found someone he believed to be a living grandson of Edith’s older brother, Milton Cook.
The team met Peter Cook, 82, at his home in San Rafael last fall and took a saliva swab for his DNA.
How did they conf irm her ID?
Using a handful of hair strands only a few inches long, Eerkens and Ed Green, a UC Santa Cruz biomolecular engineering associate professor, mapped Edith’s DNA and chemical isotopes.
The follicle tissues provided nuclear DNA — which contains genetic information from both parents but is more difficult to harvest — and mitochondrial DNA, which shows only the mother’s genetic information but is much more abundant.
Because the body had been buried for more than 140 years, only about 10% of the DNA sequenced from the hair belonged to the girl. The rest was mostly fungus or other organisms, Green said. But he and his students regularly work with DNA from ancient hominids and woolly mammoths.
“This is an atypical sample in that it’s kind of young — from 1876,” he said. “It’s kind of an easier sample.”
If Green’s team hadn’t been able to sequence Edith’s nuclear DNA, “we would not have been able to ID the girl,” Eerkens said. “In fact, we probably would have ruled [Edith] out.”
The comparison between Peter Cook’s DNA and Edith’s turned up a 12.5% match along unique genomes that can be identical only along direct descendants, Green said.
“It’s unlike a lot of scientific projects where there’s not a prospect of a binary answer like, ‘Yes, this is it,’ or, ‘No, it is not,’ ” Green said. “Most of what we do is open-ended, and progress comes in steps so small you don’t even know you’re making them. It was so special.”
What do we know about her family?
The Scooffys were among the first pioneers to arrive in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, Phillips said.
Edith’s grandfather was Peter Scooffy, an oyster merchant who immigrated from Greece via New Orleans. In 1845 he married Martha Bradley and they moved to San Francisco.
Edith’s grandfather on her paternal side, Matthew Mark Cook, hailed from England, and her paternal grandmother from Nova Scotia. The couple moved to San Francisco years after the Scooffy family. Among their children was Edith’s father, Horatio.
Together, Matthew and Horatio Cook established the family business, M.M. Cook & Son, a leather belting and hide-tanning business.
Though Edith didn’t live to see it, her family became part of the jet set in San Francisco in the early 20th century, Phillips said. Sister Ethel Cook — who was born after Edith died — grew up to become a San Francisco socialite. One news clipping described her as the “reigning belle of San Francisco,” who was “made famous by Grand Duke Boris of Russia, who drank a toast with champagne out of one of her slippers at a banquet and declared that she was the most beautiful American woman he had ever seen.”
During San Francisco’s infancy, residents and businesses coalesced around the bay. The dead were buried in what is now the financial district. But with the Gold Rush of 1849 and a flood of new residents, bodies were exhumed and relocated west, closer to the ocean, to make room for the mass migration.
By the late 1880s, there were dozens of cemeteries in San Francisco, and most were full. Officials and developers deemed the burial grounds to be more valuable to the living and launched a campaign to evict the dead.
City crews and cemetery workers hauled hundreds of thousands of corpses south to what is now Colma. But they missed a few — including Edith — in the process.
The reason is understandable. According to one researcher involved in identifying Edith, first the cemetery lands were stripped bare, and then “the removal contractors placed string lines in an east-west orientation, spaced where experience told them the most graves would be intersected. Experts moved along those string lines, probing with hardened brass rods at set intervals. They could predict by feel and experience whether there was a casket, a collapsed grave, ashes or no grave at all below. Workers dug only where they marked and as deep as they marked. Everything was done by hand.”
Where is the mystery girl now?
Edith Cook was buried under the name “Miranda Eve” on an overcast June morning last year in Colma. Her original, 37-inch-long casket was put inside a larger cherry-wood-paneled coffin with handles on each side and two bouquets of white flowers on top.
Her heart-shaped granite headstone reads:
Miranda Eve The child loved around the world
“If no one grieves, no one will remember.”
The other side was left blank in case her true name were ever discovered.
Everyone who helped in finding Edith’s identity had their own reasons for making sure the slate didn’t stay blank forever.
“People wanted to solve this,” said Green, the UC professor. It was infectious.”
A memorial service for Edith Cook is scheduled for June 10 at Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma.
Since the search for her identity began, the remains of three others buried in the Odd Fellows cemetery location have been discovered and are awaiting identification, Davey said.