From Sunken Treasures to Weird Maps, It’s a Mystery : Records: County officials are plagued by unsolved intrigues--some grim, some merely puzzling--that refuse to go away as 1994 begins.

The New Year promises a fresh start, the opportunity to shed the baggage of 365 days of loose ends and unaccomplished goals.

With a few exceptions.

When 1993 departed, it left a handful of unanswered questions to plague Orange County officials and record-keepers, mysteries that refuse to go away.

For example, the Orange County coroner’s office last year noted the passing of three men and two women who were marked for perpetuity as anonymous, bringing to an even dozen the number of John and Jane Does recorded in the past three years.

“There are 101 reasons why people might not be identified,” said deputy coroner Cullen Ellingburgh. “Maybe no one knows they are missing or there are only skeletal remains” which are difficult to identify, he said.

Surprisingly, Ellingburgh added, only a very small number of missing persons reports on file with authorities contain dental records, making it very difficult to identify skeletal remains.

Not every unanswered mystery is grim, though. Some simply reek of adventure. Take the case of the sunken merchant ship laden with riches.

“The most frequently asked-for shipwreck record is for the Adda Hancock, which blew up in Los Angeles Harbor in 1863,” said Suzanne Dewberry, assistant director of the National Archives in Laguna Niguel. “Apparently it had gold bullion on it.”

Dewberry said that of a “whole bunch” of sunken ships off the coast, the Adda Hancock is far and away the favorite among treasure hunters.

“Sometimes I think it’s a test to see if we’re able to answer,” she said of the questions posed by people with that golden glow in their eyes. “Something in old newspaper articles leads them to believe” the ship was carrying gold bullion when it sank.

Alas, archive staffers have searched for a clue so often they don’t even have to look any more in order to say there’s nothing in their 19,000 cubic feet of government records to clear up this mystery.

“We’ve been through it time and time again,” Dewberry said. “We have never, ever found any records for it.”

The federal government holds no monopoly on mysteries. There is more than one unanswered riddle filed away in the subterranean vaults of the Orange County government archives in the old County Courthouse in Santa Ana.

For starters, what’s the deal with that 140-year-old map of a stretch of English countryside?

Last February, stacks of aging court exhibits from the 1930s that had become separated from their respective case files were transferred from the county clerk’s office to the archives for storage.

But one yellowed, oversized map had no case number stamped on it, even though it bore a large letter “A,” indicating it probably had been an exhibit.

“I looked at a modern map of England and I couldn’t find it,” said archive technician Ana Christensen. “But we did enough research to find out what area it represented--West Yorkshire. It’s probably less than a square mile.”

Unable to connect the map to an Orange County court case, Christensen turned across the sea for help. “We got the address of the Sheffield city museum and made a facsimile of the map . . . and sent it to them,” she said.

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In June, Lisa A. Atkinson of the Sheffield Archives provided what news she could. “The map was most likely drawn in Sheffield . . . circa 1850,” Atkinson wrote in a letter to Orange County archivists.

A check of English census, tax and property records, voter rolls and old maps had proven a dead end.

“And she never did identify why it was here,” or why it should show up in a stack of 1930s-era Orange County court documents, Christensen said. “It’s the wrong country and the wrong century.”

In another corner of the Orange County Archives, a turn-of-the-century map of Fullerton poses a couple of intriguing questions of its own: Exactly who was buried alongside that roadway, and where did the bodies go?

The map turns up in a file from an 1898 petition for a new road that appears to be the forerunner of Associated Road in Fullerton, north of Yorba Linda Boulevard, Christensen said.

Next to the east side of the road are what appear to be markers just above the notation “graves.”

“It looks like three crosses,” Christensen said.

A further curiosity is that the review board that studied the road request and wrote a three-page report to the Board of Supervisors made not even a passing reference to the grave sites, Christensen said.

A couple years after the request was denied, another was submitted with a copy of the map, complete with markers and the same notation. But again there was no reference to the graves in the report.

“It could have been that it was on somebody’s old homestead, a family graveyard,” speculated Tom Cordry, an Orange County Cemetery District manager. “Before they would have issued them any permits to put a road through there, they probably would have had to move those bodies in those graves and interred them somewhere else.”

On the other hand, he suggested, “you might be able to dig around there and find something. They were a lot more lax about things in those days.”

The county recorder’s office may have solved one last mystery that resides in an oversized musty old book that duly records in 17 pages the county’s entire “Record of Oyster Beds.”

“We have a record of oyster beds,” allowed assistant recorder Ella Murphy, “but there’s no record of oysters ever being taken out of Orange County water.”

For the record: Early this century, a state law made it illegal to dump sewage or other garbage into waters where oysters were being cultivated.

Seizing this opportunity, locals who may best be characterized as the vanguard of the environmental movement came up with a scheme to keep the waters off Newport Beach pollution-free.

From June 9, 1910, through Sept. 13, 1920, these ocean-loving activists filed claims with the recorder’s office purporting to identify oyster beds just off Newport.

But, according to Murphy, the Orange County Historical Commission has since determined that there is no record of a single oyster ever being pulled from those waters.