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There’s been a break in 30-year-old cold case mystery at the Jersey Shore after experts confirmed skeletal remains found on three beaches belonged to a 19th-century boat captain.
The bones from a leg, arm and fragments of a cranium discovered on the beaches of Ocean City, Margate and Longport between 1995 and 2013 had yielded no answers until now.
Authorities said the remains belong to 29-year-old Captain Henry Goodsell, who died at sea 181 years ago.
Advances in DNA technology first tied the bones to the same person after cold case detectives with the state police turned to the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College of New Jersey last year.
“Our job was to figure out who that individual was that the bones belonged to,” Cairenn Binder of the college’s IGG Center said.
Initially, experts weren’t even sure how old the bones were.
“We kind of kept going back and forth between, are they historic? Are they not historic?” New Jersey State Police Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Anna Delaney said. “This is absolutely amazing because after all of this time, Henry has his name.”
Students at the school launched a search for genetic relatives and built out family trees that revealed ancestral ties to Connecticut. They also started looking into records of shipwrecks. It was that creative step that really helped them narrow in on the person’s identity.
“Delving into those they identified this ship, which then led to the ship captain,” Ramapo’s IGG Center Director David Gurney explained.
Goodsell was the captain of the Oriental which was a schooner that was transporting marble from Connecticut to Philadelphia for Girard College in 1844. But, on that voyage, the Oriental went down just off of the coast of Brigantine and the entire crew was killed.
Investigators were able to track down Goodsell’s great-great-granddaughter in Maryland. She provided a DNA sample that did confirm the captain’s identity.
“To our knowledge, this is the oldest case that’s ever been solved with investigative genetic genealogy,” Binder said.
As of this writing, Goodsell’s family does not want his bones so they will stay at a state repository indefinitely.
