After 65 years, Philadelphia police announced in December 2022 that they had identified the remains of Joseph Augustus Zarelli, a 4-year-old boy who was murdered in 1957. Because no one had ever come forward to reliably identify Joseph, he became “America’s Unknown Child,” a moniker that captured the tragic anonymity of his early death.
Recent advances in DNA analysis and forensic genealogy provided the needed breakthrough to build a genetic profile that connected the boy to surviving members of his mother’s family. But linking that genetic profile to Joseph’s identity required finding his name, a piece of information stored alongside his mother’s on his nearly 70-year-old birth record in the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s vital records system.
