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The Encyclopedia of the Missing

For Meaghan Good, the disappeared are still out here, you just have to know where to look.

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A week after she turned 19, Good started the Charley Project, an ever-expanding online database that features the stories and photographs of people who’ve been missing in the United States for at least a year. She named the site after Charles Brewster Ross, a 4-year-old boy kidnapped in 1874 from the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. His body was never found, and his abduction prompted the first known ransom note in America. Like Charles Brewster Ross, the nearly 10,000 people profiled on Good’s site are cold cases. Many fit the cliché of having vanished without a trace, and if it weren’t for Meaghan Good, most of these cases would have faded into oblivion.

Good’s website is a record of what some in law enforcement have described as a “mass disaster over time.” Almost 2,000 people are reported missing every day in America, well over a half a million each year. The majority are eventually found, either dead or alive — teen runaways, down-on-their-lucks hoping to make a clean start somewhere else, the mentally ill who stray out of their neighborhoods and onto the evening news. But tens of thousands more remain missing, often for decades. The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) currently lists more than 88,000 active missing persons cases. And Nancy Ritter of the National Institute of Justice estimated in the mid-2000s that 40,000 unidentified remains have turned up in the United States. The actual number could be far higher.

As the cold cases have multiplied, so have sites like the Charley Project, offering armchair detectives an opportunity to flex their investigative muscles and crowdsource leads.