Usually, you need a second-cousin match or closer to begin building usable family trees. Oregon genealogist Deb Stone, of Kin Forensics, began the arduous task of sifting through 12,000 distant relatives, with the hope of mapping out the tangled web of this man’s family, ultimately with the hope of finding his name.
In May 2022, the Othram DNA profile was uploaded to another ancestry site, FamilyTreeDNA.com. Again, matches were scarce and distant. But some were new.
Stone found what appeared to be a distant match’s great-great-great-grandparents, who had descendants in Washington. Stone spoke to a relative whose uncle Othaniel went missing from Arlington in 1980 when he was 82, “which was significantly older than the unidentified person was estimated to be,” according to the medical examiner’s office.
Investigators tracked down Othaniel Ames’ granddaughter. DNA testing confirmed he was the Stilly Doe.
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Matt Lacy officially identified the decedent in September.
“I would hope this becomes a very routine technique in the next few years,” Othram’s CEO David Mittelman said Thursday. “And you can kind of see, just following along in Snohomish County, just over the last couple of years, the near-emptying of the entire backlog of the unidentified.”
At the press conference Thursday, relatives gathered in Everett. Some shied away from the cameras. Others shared memories of small things, like how they knew Otie always wore long underwear, even in the warm seasons. Othaniel Ames last surviving child Walter died in 2008. His widow, Margaret, held her father-in-law’s remains in front of cameras and outstretched microphones, alongside two of her children.
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