ROOTS & BRANCHES

He’s no longer known only as “America’s Unknown Child” or simply as the “Boy in the Box.”
He is Joseph Augustus Zarelli and he lived only four short years in the 1950s.
When he was found in 1957 in what was then the semi-rural area of Fox Chase, on the edges of Philadelphia and far from the city’s downtown, the boy’s body showed evidence of beatings and malnutrition.
Literally generations of detectives worked on the case, chasing down theories and leads that never stopped coming in to them.
When the Philadelphia Police held a news conference on Dec. 8, they solved one mystery but left a few others hanging out there.
They identified the boy but not the names of his parents, who they said were deceased, but said that he had living siblings on both his father’s and mother’s sides—leaving an implication they are half-siblings; that is, some are children only of the boy’s father and others are children only of his mother. This suggests either that the parents were not married to each other or had multiple marriages.
Someone on Find A Grave created links between the boy’s memorial and a set of parents who were married after the boy was found dead. It seems likely the father is correctly named but that his wife was not the boy’s mother.
The chief genealogist on the case was Colleen M. Fitzpatrick of Identifinders International. She described it as her toughest case since the boy’s DNA sample was degraded and therefore needed to be enhanced with state-of-the-art techniques.
She found relatives of the mother first and Philadelphia officials obtained a court order to search through birth certificates of the period for children of the presumed mother, and found the boy’s 1953 birth certificate.
The certificate gave investigators the father’s name, and the DNA experts found relatives on the father’s side who matched boy’s sample.
One of these, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a man who submitted his DNA sample only because he had bought a kit to give as a Christmas present for his girlfriend—and then decided to use it himself after they broke up.
This man confirmed that the surname Zarelli was in his family; his mother and the newly identified boy were likely first cousins.
I was a tiny footnote to the news coverage about the boy. The CBS affiliate in Philadelphia, NBC10, reached out to the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania to ask if we could supply a comment.
NBC10 anchor Jim Rosenfield spoke to me by Zoom and ran a short soundbite from our interview, relating how the boom in home DNA testing has resulted in millions of people being represented either directly or by proxy (through close relatives who tested) in genetic genealogy databases.