Exhaustive measures to identify historical remains

The investigation into two bodies unearthed in 1946, suspected to be those of an infamous pair of siblings executed in 1742 for murder, has undergone comprehensive genetic investigations. Four libraries were prepared and sequenced for each of the two remains, yielding a 4X and 14X mean genome wide coverage. The data suggests high bacterial content and a high amount of unspecific sequence, with only 5-10% of reads mapping to the human genome, as well as high duplication levels (44-76%). With the aid of a dedicated group of local historians, ten distant relatives descended from the duo were identified and sampled. The 10 reference samples and 35 unrelated individuals from the Norwegian population were analysed using a GSA microarray covering an excess of 600,000 SNP markers. To augment the data and provide a higher overlap between the whole genome sequence data from the bones and the reference individuals, genotype imputation was performed on the high-quality microarray data, using 2504 individuals from 1000 Genomes (1000 G) as the reference panel for the imputation. Using a combination of IBD-segment matching and traditional likelihood ratio approaches, our combined results provide strong genetic support consistent with the proposed identification of the unidentified remains. This study demonstrates the potential of emerging genotyping approaches, combined with advanced relationship inference methods. The findings contribute to knowledge that could support future applications in forensic genetics.