Why is the the NCMEC all the sudden profiling disappearances from 1915? I mean, I appreciate that the boy was never found and everything, but isn’t a case that old a bit beyond the scope of their operations? Are they actually going to do an age progression to 115 years? Cause that’s how old Noel Elijah Davis would be by now.
I don’t know whether to add him or not. I suppose there’s nothing in the Charley Project’s own guidelines saying I can’t, and the Dorothy Arnold case is older than that, but I’ve got thousands of cases waiting for me to put them up and more requests coming in every day and I’d rather focus on people who have a snowball’s chance of being located.
The Charley Project Blog 
Well, with DNA nowadays anything can be resolved.
That doesn’t mean the Doe Network should profile the missing Princes in the Tower, though, or that they should have had the two Romanov kids up before they got identified in 2009.
I’m not sure if they should be listed, but keeping the case technically open can’t hurt.
Well, yeah. The Princes in the Tower (of London, I’m presuming) mystery was a British case and your site only deals with American ones. 😉
BTW, got a chance to visit the Tower of London in 1999 and it is spellbinding. I even saw where the two little princes were apparently held. I want to go back so badly. Hell, I want to LIVE in London, period.
If I were you, I’d add him after getting done with the backlog of requests I’ve gotten. I’m fascinated by very old MP cases, even though the chances of them ever being solved are very remote. I always kind of thought of your pre-1950s section as sort of a memorial – that even though they’ve been missing so long and most of the world has forgotten them, there’s a little corner of the internet (your site) where their stories haven’t been lost to time.
Also, I just noticed you don’t have a profile for either Charley Ross or Jimmy Hoffa. Would you ever do those? I think it’d be kind of fun, even though the chances of either of them ever being found are basically 0.
The oldest cases are the most interesting ones, IMHO. And they do get solved sometimes. (Remember Boulder Jane Doe?)
Noel Davis might be a skeletal John Doe somewhere, but now someone will finally match him and clear another case!
I doubt I’ll ever finish with the backlog of individually requested cases. And then there’s the Folder where MP cases go to die.
It works like this: every time I find an MP case, say in NamUs or the CDOJ database or the NCMEC or a police department website or whatever, or an article about an MP, I bookmark it. These bookmarks appear in the default bookmarks folder (on Chrome it’s called “other bookmarks”) like any other bookmark. The list gets longer and longer. I delete bookmarks when I add a case or include an article’s information into an existing case, but I keep adding bookmarks faster than I can delete them.
Eventually I get fed up with the number of bookmarks in my default folder and move most or all of them into the Folder. The Folder contains 26 of its own folders, one per letter, of alphabetically archived bookmarks of cases I need to add. There must be well over a thousand of them in there by now. And I can’t remember the last time I even looked at it, never mind put up a case from it. The Folder is an MP cold case graveyard. Barring something like a person requesting I add that case, or some breaking news concerning that case, the chances of a case in the Folder actually appearing on Charley are quite small. I’ve actually stopped bookmarking NamUs cases because they’ll probably just end up in the Folder anyway. Instead, periodically I go on NamUs and write up recently-eligible cases (people that have been missing just over a year) or cases that catch my eye for one reason or another.
I am of course very sorry for it but I don’t see any other way, as long as the Charley Project is written by only one person.
As for Jimmy Hoffa, he could conceivably go on Charley but it would take a lot of work. Possibly entire books have been written about Hoffa’s disappearance, and I would also have to go into the details of his life and why he was made to disappear. Charley Ross is just too old for me, although I often tell his story to news reporters who interview me.
What you need are volunteer assistants, particularly for the older cases. Maybe one could work on the pre-1930s potential cases, one for potential 1930s – 1960s cases, and one for 1970s cases (since that seems to be when people went missing at a greater rate). That’s just my idea, one of many potentials, and I’m just throwing it out there.
It might be nice if there were a separate page dedicated to old missing person’s cases (those 75+ years old.) I’m fascinated with those, too.
I love the old cases, too! But you do what’s best Meaghan.
Noel Elijah Davis is in NamUs MP # 24522
https://www.findthemissing.org/cases/show/24522
My guess is some distant relative is hoping to match him to a historically documented John Doe. Its remotely possible they could make a match but unless we learn more he should go to the bottom of the list
For instance who is 55 to 65 year old unidentified man (NamUs UP # 8366; ME case 36-1637) who perished in a dormitory fire at Parker Dam, San Bernardino County, California on February 3, 1936?
They know enough about him, news reports and so on, that the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office – Coroner Division is considering a exhumation to obtain a DNA sample almost 80 years later.
Meaghan,
Historical cases that are not active investigations ( Not in NamUs, NCMEC, or any state database for instance) should be approached from that perspective of a interesting historical account. And that’s what you seem to have done.
Therefore the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold in 1910 is fine but Elaine Conners born in 1900 in New Jersey and Mary Ann Pagan born in New York are not.
Even though Elaine and Mary Ann have been compared to a Jane Doe found on 5/25/08 at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, New York nothing more is known about them.
May I suggest a interesting historical addition?
Olga Mauger, 21, missing since 9/17/34 from Twogwotee Pass near Dubois, Wyoming.
From Robert Waters blog; ‘Kidnapping, Murder and Mayhem.’