Welcome to The Lost People, the unofficial NamUs.gov spatial database viewer and querier. NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) is a public database for searching cases of missing, unidentified, and unclaimed persons in the United States, including territories. The purpose of this website is to offer an alternative querying tool and to provide a spatial view of the number of cases by state, county, and city.

Missing Person: A person who has disappeared and may be alive or deceased.

Unidentified Person: A deceased person whose legal identity is unknown (Jane or John Doe).

Unclaimed Person: A deceased person with a known name, but with no known next of kin, or family member, who could claim the deceased's body for burial or disposal.

Disclaimer: Cases will only appear in NamUs if a public or professional user reports the case to NamUs. Currently only four states (New York, Connecticut, Tennessee, and New Jersey) have legislation requiring new cases to be reported by law enforcement. Therefore, it should be noted that cases available on this site are merely a subset of the total missing, unidentified, and unclaimed persons nationwide. For example, in 2019 the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) estimated there are more than 87,000 missing persons in the country - as of 4/18/2020, NamUs only has records for 17,892 missing persons.

Case records in each of the three databases were mapped to the highest possible level. For example, all records that specified a state were mapped at the state level, all records that further specified a county were also mapped at the county level, and all records that further specified a city were also mapped at the city level.

Data in this webmap is not currently synced with NamUs - data shown was pulled from NamUs on 4/18/2020.

This interactive webmap was made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for Interactive Cartography & Geovisualization (GEOG 575, Spring 2020).

Created by Hayley Corson-Dosch, Christopher Pierson, and Josh Seibel.