Judith Threlkeld was last seen March 8, 1976, on Central Avenue in Silver Creek after departing the Anderson-Lee Library.

While looking through some casefiles, investigators with the county’s recently established Unsolved Crimes Unit came across the name Judith Threlkeld.

It was from a note the Sheriff’s Office had received and was now included in the files of an unrelated homicide investigation. But the discovery got the new part-time investigators curious — who is Judith Threlkeld?

That mystery, it turns out, is part of a decades old missing person case police hope to finally solve.

“There is such limited information on her,” Lt. Alex Nutt of the Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday. “I wasn’t even aware of the case.”

Threlkeld was 22 years old when she was last seen March 8, 1976, walking home on Central Avenue in Silver Creek after leaving Anderson-Lee Library. Her disappearance was reported to the village’s police department, which oversaw the investigation for years without an answer.

Now 46 years later and without much else known about the events leading to Threlkeld going missing, investigators are taking a proactive approach to get the word out.

A Facebook page, “Unsolved Chautauqua,” has been created in the last few days to highlight open missing person cases and unsolved crimes. It follows the establishment of the Unsolved Crimes Unit within the Sheriff’s Office comprised of investigators Tom Tarpley and Tom Di Zinno to go over open cases with a fresh set of eyes.

The unit, through its new Facebook page, detailed the Threlkeld case in a call to the public for new information.

Tarpley and Di Zinno have reached out to Threlkeld’s relatives and are in the process of contacting those who had worked in Silver Creek before the police department was dissolved.

“They are working on trying to get files in Silver Creek,” Nutt said. “Being an unsolved missing person case, the information might be limited from a long time ago.”

On the day she was last seen in Silver Creek in 1976, Threlkeld was reportedly wearing blue jeans, a khaki shirt, a blue sweater, a navy blue suede coat and snow boots. She also was carrying a brown purse.

Anyone with information regarding Threlkeld is asked to call the Unsolved Crimes Unit hotline at 716-753-4578 or send an email to unsolvedchautauqua@sheriff.us.