BY LINDSAY MCCOY

Times Bulletin News Writer

lmccoy@timesbulletin.com

VENEDOCIA - The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently featured an article about missing children and the impact it has on their families, and Venedocia resident, Meaghan Good, was featured in the article for her website, CharleyProject.org, which contains a database of more than 9,000 unsolved missing adults and children from across the United States.
"I have always been interested in missing people," said Good. "When I was 12-years-old, I stumbled across a website for missing people and that is where my fascination began. When I was 17, a lady running a missing person site retired, and I assumed running the site for 11 months before I changed the name to the CharleyProject in 2004."

Cases can be searched alphabetically, chronologically, geographically, and by those that have most recently been updated. Good not only focuses on those cases that are the most recent in still in the eye of the media but those that have been long forgotten.

Chronologically, the first case the CharleyProject highlights is a missing person's case from 1910, complete with disappearance information and pictures of Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold who went missing in New York City at the age of 25 after she went shopping for an evening gown and never returned to her millionaire family.

"For those people that will never be found, this site is a memorial to them," noted Good. "I feel it is my personal duty to highlight as many of these stories as possible." The CharleyProject has become Good's full time job and will often spend up to 4-12 hours a day researching information and updating the site.

Good's ultimate goal is for these missing people to be found, and she noted that people have been found thanks to her dedication to this site. In the case of a New Jersey woman's body being found and left unidentified for years, a police officer working on the case contacted Good and thanks to her extensive detail in her missing person reports the officer was able to connect the dots and identify the deceased woman who had gone unnamed for so many years.

With so many missing person cases, Good often comes across a variety of sad and crazy stories. The story that pulled at her emotions the most was a case of a 6-year-old boy who went missing in 2002 and no one noticed he was gone. The boy was passed around between family members, and it was year's before the family realized he was gone. It is cases such as this that Good wants to highlight to preserve the memory of these lost people.

Good's job requires a lot of reading, and what sets her site apart from any other missing person's site is that it combines all the information on a person in one central location. While this requires a lot of Good's time, it simplifies the search for others who may be looking for every detail in a disappearance.

"Meaghan runs this site all by herself," said her father, Charles Good. "It is her gift to humanity." Good's father provides her with financial support to keep this site up and running as a lot of the databases she must access to gain information require a fee. A medical issue has kept Good from finding other work, but thanks for the kind donations of her father she is able to make this site a reality.

Good believes this is her calling in life and is continually motivated to keep all of these special cases in the public's eye. With the recent rescue of the Cleveland kidnapping victims, the number of visitors to the CharleyProject website has tripled and continues to surge in numbers. The happy ending in the case of the missing women in Cleveland could have the potential to help other missing people to be found by bringing awareness to this all-to-common issue.