ATLANTA --- A tourist strolling on Cumberland Island found the man's skull partially buried in the sand.

It had been years since the man uttered his own name, and the elements that ravaged his remains removed nearly all hope of anyone else doing so.

But the dental work in the skull, found in 2001, speaks to Dr. Rick Snow, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's first full-time forensic anthropologist.

The technique and crudeness resembled the product of Eastern European dentists, a look Mr. Snow grew familiar with while sifting through mass graves in Kosovo on behalf of the United Nations two years earlier. Given that only the skull washed up, the man, whose skull suggests he was white and between 40 and 60 years old, probably jumped ship but never made it to land, Mr. Snow surmised.

Today, the skull is among the 62 sets of remains authorities have uncovered around the state since 1969 but have been unable to identify. In each case, the bones and clothing give slight clues into a person's life. But one thing is always missing.

"I can tell you a zillion things, except the one thing I need most: who they are," Mr. Snow said.

That final detail, if missing, can leave questions on a family's mind and hamper investigations. So the task falls to Mr. Snow to glean what he can from the remains.

Citizens' groups devoted to putting a name to unidentified remains have sprung up in recent years.

"Some people are saddened because they hope for something different. Some people are so relieved that they finally validated what they already knew," said Todd Matthews, a spokesman for the DOE Network, an online group whose 500 volunteers have helped solve 40 cases.

Not knowing what happened to a relative can be a fate worse than death, Mr. Matthews said. And it can let a killer go free, because an unidentified victim can throw a wrench into the prosecution of a suspect, Mr. Snow said.

The process of identifying remains starts like a TV crime drama. Hunters sneaking through the woods find a skeleton, or the family dog comes home with a human femur.

Many times authorities know exactly who the person is. But if a check of missing persons records and several missing persons Web sites doesn't produce a match, Mr. Snow begins compiling a biological profile, basing age, sex, race and stature on signs that human bones and teeth provide. A forensic artist then creates an image of what the person might have looked like.

DNA material Mr. Snow gathers is shipped to the FBI in Quantico, Va., where it is continually checked for matches with samples entered into a nationwide database.

Medical examiners across the county have on file the remains of about 14,000 people who have not been identified, according to a 2007 report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Mr. Matthews, of the DOE Network, said the figure is probably closer to 40,000.

Mr. Snow said about four bodies a year go without identification in Georgia. Identifications are often difficult because the migration of records to the digital age left many behind in paper form, he said.

Another hurdle is that many of the unidentifiable remains are those of people on the fringe of society -- prostitutes, drug addicts, the homeless -- who haven't maintained the bonds that would cause someone to report them missing, Mr. Snow said.

"In many cases we never knew and will never know where they came from," he said.

Reach Jake Armstrong at (404) 589-8424 or jake.armstrong@morris.com.