DNA STORIES 
The Saga of Bobby Dunbar

Last Sunday at our monthly QHGS meeting, we heard first-hand how DNA information was used to reunite two people of uncertain parentage to living relatives. But what happens when family questions are over 100 years old? Can DNA solve a mystery like that?

   image: This American Life

Bobby Dunbar was a boy whose disappearance at the age of four and apparent return was widely reported in newspapers across the United States in 1912 and 1913. After an eight-month nationwide search, investigators believed that they had found the child traveling in the company of an itinerant peddler, and Dunbar’s parents claimed the boy as their missing son. In 2004, DNA profiling established in retrospect that the found boy had not been a blood relative of the Dunbar family. Listen to this genealogical adventure story by clicking http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/352/the-ghost-of-bobby-dunbar on This American Life, Episode 352, March 14, 2008.

Wikipedia’s article is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Bobby_Dunbar.

Historic Mysteries at http://www.historicmysteries.com/what-happened-to-bobby-dunbar/ also has an article about the Dunbar kidnapping.

Want to learn more? Read the book, A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation, by Tal McThenia and Margaret Dunbar Cutright. It is available on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Case-Solomon-Dunbar-Kidnapping-Haunted/dp/1439158606.

RESEARCH TIP: DNA can help us prove relationships that our genealogical research has indicated might be in question, but it is not a “magic bullet” that answers every question. As you listen to the hour presentation from This American Life you will see how much research in newspapers and libraries went into establishing a plausible scenario of what occurred before anyone took a DNA test to confirm relationships.