The latest breaking updates, delivered straight to your email inbox.

Skeletal remains discovered in a Victorian-era coffin, unearthed during a construction project five years ago in Sanford, are one step closer to being identified.

"It's like it wasn't even acknowledged that she was missed. But we're not going to miss her. We're going to find out," said Paul Auger. Auger is a historian and history teacher at Sanford High School. He was driving down Main Street in May 2017 when he glanced over at the construction site for a new Cumberland Farms and knew immediately that they had found another coffin. "I saw a bunch of police officers and maybe some firefighters and construction people in a big group looking down and I knew immediately what had happened," Auger said. He got a closer look. "This coffin, I'd never seen anything like this. It was completely degraded there was almost no wood left," Auger said. There once was an old school that sat on a corner in the downtown area. It had been torn down. Then there was a playground, but in the late 1800's, it was Woodlawn Cemetery. By the 1930s, they thought all the graves had been moved to the new Goodall Cemetery down the road.

"It's not unusual in old burial grounds that had been moved, which happens quite often, that they miss someone or more," Auger said.

Auger involved his students to help solve this archeological mystery. They found ribs, finger bones, and pieces of a jawbone with half a dozen teeth still intact. "Then we found some more coffin parts. We found four handles," Auger said. "Two large keys that were quite rusted. It turns out coffin keys were a thing in the Victorian era." Most hauntingly, they found pieces of glass.

"A broken pane of glass and we figured out that it was right where the head was – so the coffin had a window," Auger said. "So, all of these clues, it had to be Victorian era," he said.

Then Sanford enlisted the help of a national organization — the DNA Doe Project — which has successfully solved more than 90 cases by uploading information into genealogy sites like Ancestry.com to search for a match. Jennifer Randolph is based in New Hampshire and works for the DNA Doe Project. "So, we need a good profile. Good matches and good records to be able to make the identification," Randolph said. "We have to correlate what we are seeing in the DNA and the direction that's pointing with records to be able to explain this person makes sense given the DNA and here we have records that show they were in Sanford at the right time to be the person who we are trying to identify."

Auger's mission is to find out who the girl was and if she has any surviving relatives. "If we can do her justice, put a name to her and put her in a real final resting place, wherever it is, that to me is the most important thing," Auger said. That resting place could be the Goodall Cemetery where all the other bodies were moved. Maybe she belongs here.

"Her parents could be right behind us somewhere – this little girl. We are going to find out pretty soon," Auger said.

After all these years, the mystery of who this little girl is – just might be solved in the next few months.

Hearst Television participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.