(JTA) — On March 29, 2011, the body of a decapitated woman was discovered in a vineyard in Arvin, a town just over the Los Angeles county line.

Earlier this month, nearly 13 years later, the victim was identified as Ada Beth Kaplan, a Jewish woman who was 64 at the time of her death.

The tortuous journey to cracking the mystery of Kaplan’s name involved a “long and hard” multiyear effort by a DNA-focused nonprofit, eight generations of family records and the work of two Jewish genealogists who understood just how thorny it can be, sometimes, to ascertain the identity of an unknown Ashkenazi Je...