Only eight people have been granted honorary citizenship in the United States. Churchill, Mother Teresa, and The Marquis de Lafayette are among them. And then there’s another Revolutionary War hero, a man named Casimir Pulaski. You may have heard of him because of several towns and counties in the US bear his name. Like Lafayette, Pulaski joined the battle against what he felt was the oppression of the British government against the freedom-loving Americans. He did this in part because he had waged a similar but unsuccessful fight as a cavalry officer in his native Poland some time before and had been exiled by the powers that were in the country at the time. That’s when he came across Ben Franklin and Lafayette in Paris who convinced him to continue his fight for freedom and against tyranny by journeying to the newly-formed United States and joining the fight there.

And, so, he and several of his fellow Polish cavalry officers did. Pulaski had come from the nobility in Poland (he bore the title, “Count Pulaski”) and, thus, had some money of his own. He used some of his fortune to finance the first true cavalry unit in the United States Army, becoming known as the Father of the American Cavalry to this day. And he fought in the war effort from north to south along the eastern seaboard; he went as far north as New York and as far south as Georgia. When he stepped off the boat in Massachusetts, touching American soil for the first time, it is reported that he said, “I came here to defend freedom, to serve it, to live or die for it.” And, with this spirit and his skills as a cavalry officer and ability to train troops in the saddle, Pulaski became a national hero to those Americans who supported the war against Great Britain. He is even credited with saving the life of General George Washington in battle.

It was in the south, near Savannah, Georgia, that Pulaski was knocked unconscious and mortally wounded by cannon fire during a charge. He was taken aboard a ship in Savannah harbor and died from his wounds two days later having never regained consciousness. The nation mourned. This brave man’s story was their story in many ways. Many Americans at the time were still immigrants from Europe; they had left the oppression of European tyrants to come to the freedom of the American lands, and, even though he was of the nobility, they saw Pulaski as one of them. He died a hero.

Well, for various reasons, what happened to Pulaski’s body after his death got clouded and confused. Some said he was buried at sea after a funeral in Savannah. Others said that he was buried on some high ground on a plantation not too far outside of Savannah. For decades, no one knew for sure. Then, in 1853, a body was found on the grounds of the plantation and tentatively identified as Pulaski’s. That body was re-interred in a memorial to the cavalryman in Savannah. But, then, in 1996, the bones were dug up and underwent a forensic study to determine if they were, in fact, the bones of the Polish hero.

The analysis took eight years.

In the end, the bones were consistent with someone who was Pulaski’s age and military background. There was an injury to the skull consistent with an injury he’d sustained as a younger man fighting in Poland. One cheekbone had a defect, and that matches with Pulaski having had a bone tumor there. And, after comparison to the DNA of a known living great-grand niece, the study said that there was strong probability that the bones were, in fact, those of Count Casimir Pulaski. But, the years-long analysis also showed something no one suspected, either when Pulaski lived or since.

That the Polish hero might have been a woman.