Just two miles south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the tugboat Nancy Allen needed to refuel. Capt. Christopher Campbell tried to put in at Wickliffe, but the fierce current kept pulling the boat away from Kentucky and toward the Missouri shore.

That was when the crew saw the lump in the water and thought it was a deer caught in the strong undertow. Attempting to retrieve it, they realized the lump was not a deer but a man. Unable to bring him aboard, they took a barge rope, fastened him to the side of the boat and brought him to the near bank, where they waited for the Ballard County Sheriff's Department rescue squad to arrive.

The body in the water looked really good for a dead man. The man still had skin and hair. He was dressed in jeans, with a layer of gray sweatpants underneath, which was a little odd because it was May 21, and it had been warm out for a while.

Deputy Sheriff Bobby Hickman says floating bodies on the river aren't as common as you might think. He can remember only one in his 15 years on his job.

The coroner would do the pronouncement of death. Then, it would be back to the sheriff's department to find out exactly who this man was and to notify his people. The medical examiner would determine how he died.

The body was bundled off to the medical examiner's office in Madisonville where, after a day, Dr. DeDe Schluckebier definitively could say that the man in the Mississippi had died from blunt force trauma to his chest. She determined his injuries were consistent with someone who had hit a steering wheel in a car accident. But it's not like the sheriff's department or anyone else had found a car in the river.

The man had been in the water, Schluckebier said, for as little as one week and maybe as long as 24 weeks, and probably had been stuck near the bottom of the river — where the water would be coldest — for most of that time, as decomposition had hardly set in. He was 45 to 65 years old.

Soon enough, Kentucky State Police sent Hickman three possible matches of known missing persons, but none fit the description of the bearded and slightly balding 6-foot-2, 230-pound white man.

Schluckebier took stock of the situation. The man could have drifted up or down that river, having fallen off a thousand banks or dropped off a thousand boats. She had no location to start to look for his identity. She knew what he died of but not what manner of death had dealt the blow.

All she had was him.

And she knew soon enough she had one place she could go. She was going to enter him into a new nationwide database of unidentified persons.

Schluckebier told Hickman she was going to get his identifying characteristics onto the U.S. Department of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, database to see what it could do.

Hickman had never heard of such a thing.

Schluckebier's first call was to Emily Craig.

The state's forensic anthropologist says that dozens of unidentified bodies turn up in the state every year, but within a few days of having been found, nearly all are identified. That is, after all, what her office does. They take the location of the found body, the circumstances surrounding its condition, its time of death, its age, race, sex, stature, height and weight. All of that adds up to a narrow range of possible humanity.

Less than 1 percent of the time, says Craig, or about one set of remains a year, is there a John or Jane Doe. On the books in Kentucky, dating to 1969, there were 38 such cases of remains without names.

On May 26, Emily Craig took Schluckebier's call and added the man in the Mississippi as No. 39.

His listing on the site includes, for the entire public to view in the manageable and fully searchable database, much of what authorities know about his case. You can even see the pictures of his sodden brown size 11 wide Clark's shoes. You can read the description of his legs. You can view his dental X-rays.

The addition of this entry was the first time since Nam-Us fully launched in January that a new Kentucky case has been added. Kentucky was, in fact, one of the few states with its entire catalog of unidentifieds entered into NamUs. This process started as soon as the Web site launched.

NamUs is the six-year culmination of a National Institute of Justice initiative to improve the nation's ability to address missing-person cases. That initiative includes training law enforcement, medical examiners, judges and attorneys about forensic DNA evidence. It also includes an effort to standardize record keeping.

Why? Because, in 2004, it was found that half of the nation's medical examiners had no policy for retaining X-rays, DNA or fingerprints of unidentified decedents. And while missing-persons' cases for children have strict legislated mandates for reportage, only a few states require the same for cases involving missing adults. In Kentucky, police are required to accept missing-person cases only if the person is younger than 21, mentally handicapped, or elderly and with diminished capacity.

These were problems that the families of the missing had complained about for years. And they are gaps that have been filled by citizen activists like Todd Matthews of Tennessee, who devoted himself to identifying the 30-year-old cold case of the "Tent Girl" in Scott County and who later aided in the creation of the Doe Network.

These were frustrations shared by coroners and medical examiners who had, in some jurisdictions such as Clark County, Nev., or Fulton County, Ga., responded by setting up their own limited missing-persons databases.

In spring 2005, an "Identifying the Missing" Summit brought all interested parties together, including Craig and Matthews, and NamUs was created.

There is much still to be done to make it the clearinghouse that organizers envision.

According to the NamUs Web site, there are 4,400 initially unidentified remains found nationwide every year, and more than 1,000 are still unidentified after one year. Add those to the number of nameless already sitting on shelves of medical examiners or buried in civic cemeteries as John or Jane Does, and there are an estimated 40,000 sets of remains in this country waiting to regain the names they wore in life.

Equally astonishing, there are as many as 100,000 active missing-person cases at any given time in the United States.

The man in the Mississippi had the great advantage of being put into the system when the system was beginning to feel its oats. Now, finally geared to cross-match the characteristics within its missing-persons database against the characteristics in its unidentified decedents database, it almost immediately spit out two possible matches.

It was the kind of thing amateur sleuths had been doing by hand in the middle of the night, in hopes of finding names to put on sets of descriptions. But the effect was the same. Just as amateurs and family members would call Craig, for example, and ask her to check something for them, so, too, the computer sent her a kind of Post-it note to do the legwork.

It asked her to see whether Kentucky's 39th case might be solved with the names of George Miles or Mark Folz.

Craig took one look at Folz's file and saw that he had prosthetic legs. The man in the Mississippi has a scar on his right hip and on both legs. He has an L-shaped scar on his right ankle and a Z-shaped scar on his right knee. He has triple in-line puncture wounds on his left lower leg and right thigh that indicate he was probably in traction at some point. He has X-ray irregularities on his left lower leg.

Craig immediately excluded Folz, noting on the Web site that Folz had been checked and was not a match.

As for George Miles, Craig could see right off the bat that his dental records didn't match. Anyone could have made that comparison, she said. But she noted it. And somewhere in Minnesota, Miles' family breathed a sigh of relief, or abject sadness, that their search will go on.

Since those first two potential matches, 12 more have shown up for the Ballard County find. Each comes complete with a name and a set of circumstance about how he came to be missing.

But all of the descriptions are too unspecific for Craig to do much. That is, they are without dental records.

"Dental records. Dental records. Dental records," she says, emphatically. "If we had them, we'd have instant identification or instant exclusion. Families of the missing must put those in. If they don't do that, we are severely limited in what we can do to help them."

The great thing about Nam-Us, says Craig, is that while, yes, medical examiners and coroners are the only ones who place information onto the unidentified persons database, anyone can upload data directly to the missing-persons site.

In the case of the man in the Mississippi, Craig says, his teeth and the scars on his legs are so unique as to be tantamount to bar codes.

If someone is looking for him, he has a red flag and is waving it.

No. 39 now has a whole array of people looking for him and at him every day.

Those people include members of the Lexington Citizens' Police Academy, who have been trained to help Craig search the Web site for matches.

One of the biggest obstacles to identifying him is getting the checkerboard of law enforcement agencies from various state and municipal jurisdictions to start dumping their data into the NamUs database. And to get those miscellaneous stores of data about the missing to start doing likewise.

"Getting these records is the thing," said Billy Young, NamUs coordinator. In some instances, he said, backlogs might require staffing, and that requires money. In other cases, it's as simple as getting the word out.

On Oct. 1, U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, introduced HR Bill 3695. It will provide $10 million during the next five years to fund the sharing of information between the FBI's National Crime Information Center and NamUs, "to create more comprehensive missing-persons and unidentified-remains databases," and streamline the reporting process for local law enforcement. According to advocates, the bill is badly in need of congressional sponsors if it hopes to get out of committee.

As of Friday, there were 5,632 open unidentified-persons records on the NamUs Web site and 2,099 missing-persons records in the system.

Five cases of matching an unidentified person with a missing person have occurred with NamUs' help.

It's a start.

Matthews, the advocate for missing persons, continues to explain to families of the missing how they can add things to the site, how they can download their own photographs, how they must do everything but get in the way of law enforcement.

But the families also must be something else, Matthews says: They are the reminders of the humanity that should never be forgotten in the science and the chaos and the crime.

The man who was taken from the Mississippi was not forgotten and shelved. He was autopsied and catalogued for clues. His DNA was sampled. The police, coroners and forensic experts took all they needed, then he was quietly buried in the Wickliffe city cemetery in LaCenter.

A lot of people know where to find him should someone ask.

All that is left is for those who love him to come and get him.