Body found under Bay Area home identified as girl who died in 1876

Reporting from San Francisco —  The body of a 19th-century 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 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.

FILE - This Saturday, June 4, 2016, file photo shows the gravestone that will mark the new grave of a girl, found last month buried in San Francisco, at Greenlawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Colma, Calif. The girl who died in 1876 and was found last year inside a small metal casket under a San Francisco home has been identified. The nonprofit Garden of Innocence project said Tuesday, May 9, 2017, that the child was 2-year-old Edith Howard Cook, who died on Oct. 13, 1876. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP, File)

(Michael Macor / Associated Press)

She was reinterred at Greenlawn last year under a headstone bearing the name Miranda Eve, which had been the child’s nickname when her real name was unknown.

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

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

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