More than two decades after a group of Boy Scouts stumbled upon a skull while hiking near Houlton, Wis. a group that specializes in forensic genealogy identified the remains as those of a Stillwater woman who died of natural causes in 2001 and was reported to have been cremated.

The St. Croix County Sheriff’s Office contacted the DNA Doe Project in 2021, and the nonprofit soon created a genetic profile of the woman, which revealed that she was of Swedish ancestry. Early in the investigation, a forensic examination mistakenly determined that the remains were from a person of Asian or Native American heritage.

Using DNA databases, forensic genealogists sketched out the mystery woman’s family tree, and found a distant relative in Stockholm, whose great great granduncle emigrated to the Unit

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