Body found under San Francisco home identified as 1876 girl

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The 19th-century body of a girl found last year inside a small metal casket under a San Francisco home has been identified.

The nonprofit Garden of Innocence project said Tuesday that the child was 2-year-old Edith Howard Cook, who died on Oct. 13, 1876.

The girl was apparently left behind when the remains of about 30,000 people originally buried in San Francisco’s Odd Fellows Cemetery in the Richmond District were moved in the 1920s to Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma.

Researchers caught a big break when they found a map of the old cemetery at a University of California, Berkeley library and matched it to the Cook’s burial plot.

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DNA taken from Edith’s well-preserved body matches Marin County resident Peter Cook — Edith’s grandnephew.