Recent forensic testing of DNA samples may have failed to close a more than 50-year-old missing person case, but the evidence might someday provide a name for a Walker County, Ga., gravestone, officials said.

“I grew up about a mile from where the body was found,” 50-year-old Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson said. “I’ve heard that referred to as ‘Dead Man’s Hollow’ all my life.”

The body of a white male was found June 25, 1953, on West Rogers Road in the Walnut Grove community and never identified.

Sheriff Wilson was on hand when the unknown man’s remains were exhumed at LaFayette Cemetery on Feb. 8, 2008, and turned over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

It was hoped that mitochondrial DNA testing might determine the body was that of Miami of Ohio University student Ronald Tammen Jr. who had gone missing on April 19, 1953.

Last month the GBI released a lab report on findings that showed Mr. Tammen and the Walker County body were not the same.

“It wasn’t such bad news,” Sheriff Wilson said. “The worst would have been that we could not get any information.”

Mitochondrial DNA testing establishes a connection to a family tree along the mother’s lineage and is especially useful in identifying skeletal remains, officials said.

The Pentagon’s POW/MIA Office uses such DNA testing as part of forensic examinations of remains. DNA tests were one of the techniques used to positively identify remains expatriated from North Korea in 2007 as those of Sgt. Hershel White, a Bryant, Ala., native who died in battle during the Korean War.

Mitochondrial DNA testing has been used since 1993 by the military, mostly on remains from the World War II era to current times, according to Larry Greer, spokesman for the POW/MIA Office.

“The most distant one was a DNA match on remains from World War I,” Mr. Greer said. “We used the services of a genealogist and found a niece in her 80s who was a match.”

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation regularly deals with testing of nuclear DNA and had the FBI perform mitochondrial DNA testing on the remains found in LaFayette, according to GBI spokesman John Bankhead.

“We did not think the FBI could get DNA from the samples, but we sent bone fragments to their lab,” he said. “The results will go into the unidentified remains database.”

Unlike mitochondrial testing which only shows people as being related, nuclear DNA testing is specific to an individual, Mr. Bankhead said.

All convicted and incarcerated felons in Georgia must submit samples for inclusion in the state database, and that database “so far has provided evidence in more than 900 cases for local law enforcement that otherwise would not have been solved,” he said.

Effective July 1, a loophole in Georgia law regarding DNA testing was closed, according to state Rep. Jay Neal, R-LaFayette, the bill’s sponsor.

“This law allows the GBI to gather DNA samples early in the investigation and is directly the result of the Hilton hiker killing case,” Rep. Neal said.

Gary Michael Hilton is the 61-year-old man who confessed to killing Georgia hiker Meredith Emerson, and he is a suspect in the beating deaths of two other women.

“A DNA sample was wanted to compare to other cases, active or cold,” Rep. Neal said.

Instead, the sample could be used only for investigation of the misdemeanor case for which he had been taken into custody.

“This new law has limitations,” Rep. Neal said. “DNA is not collected and entered into the database, it is matched once to check on other cases, and the DNA is never entered if a suspect is found not guilty.”

Repeated telephone calls to get comments from Oxford, Ohio, police investigators were unsuccessful, but local officials say they understand Mr. Tammen’s disappearance remains an open case.

And regarding the unidentified body that gave Dead Man’s Hollow its name, Sheriff Wilson said it remains an unsolved, open case.

“We are not going to put this case on the back burner,” Sheriff Wilson said. “We hope to eventually be successful in identifying the person that was in that grave.”