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Many in search of their family trees find themselves drowning in an endless paper trail. Genealogy used to be a matter of dusty records, family Bibles and ship manifests. And frustrated by dim memories, distant archives, faded records and unidentified photos, more than a few have put the search aside for another day.

SALT LAKE CITY—Sixty-one years ago, Northwest Airlines Flight 4422 smashed into Alaska’s Mount Sanford, killing all 24 passengers — merchant marines returning to the U.S. from China — and six crew members aboard. The wreck of the DC-4 was presumed to have been buried in snow and swallowed into a glacier. For nearly 50 years, no debris or remains were found.

Genealogist is not a typical publishing title, yet forensic genealogy, best known for tracking down heirs, played a key role in unmasking two of 2008’s biggest publishing hoaxes: Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence. Colleen Fitzpatrick and Sharon Sergeant worked on both cases pro bono, largely because when they learned about them—the Defonseca story came from former U.S. publisher Jane Daniels’s blog, Rosenblat from Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt’s blog—they knew they could bring resolution to the controversy that surrounded each story.