In 2017, a body of a young girl was found inside a 19th century metal casket under a San Francisco home and was finally discovered 141 years after she died. The child was 2-year-old Edith Howard Cook, who died on Oct. 13, 1876, and she was 6 weeks away from her third birthday. Her plot was moved in the 1830s, but the small casket was left behind when about 30,000 people who were originally buried in the city’s Odd Fellows Cemetery were moved in the 1920s to Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma. The girl’s remains were found by construction workers remodeling the home in May 2018. The casket was made of metal and was 37 inches long with two viewing windows in the lid. Researchers quickly began the process of trying to identify the remains, almost to no avail. Until Elissa Davey, a genealogist and founder of the Garden of Innocence Project, said she caught a break in the quest to identify the girl when they found a map of the old cemetery at a University of California, Berkeley library. She was able to match it to a plot where her parents, Horatio Cook and Edith Scooffy, were once buried. UC Davis Professor Jelmer Eerkens, who helped with the DNA testing, told KTVU that Edith died of marasmus, which is severe undernourishment. “It’s likely she was sick with some disease and at some point her immune system couldn’t combat the disease and probably went into a coma and passed away,” he said. The case was reopened in 2021 because the owner of the house, Elissa Davey stated that she could sometimes hear the little girl left behind. “They put two girls to bed and they’d hear running feet upstairs.” Her and her husband would say, “who is out of bed and the girls would still be sound asleep,” said Davey. After they found the little girl’s body, her well-off family gave her an ornate burial. She was clothed in a white christening dress and ankle-high boots. Tiny purple flowers were woven into her hair and she held a purple Nightshade flower in her right hand. Davey said a headstone will replace the one put in during re-burial  that had “Miranda Eve” carved into it. It will say ‘Edith Howard Cook’ with her birthday, death date and a verse from Amazing Grace, “I was once lost but now I’ve been found.” Makanda, in 3rd block journalism states “it is really sad that she died at 2 years old, and a bit weird that when they moved all of the other coffins and graves, they didn’t move hers.” “I think that they may have not seen hers at first before they were building the house, and she may have not gotten a gravestone, so the people that dug up all the others didn’t even know that she was there.”

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4492374/19th-century-child-California-identified.html