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?