Jo Anne Shirley likens it to “a big load lifted off your heart.”

Last week, the Dalton resident received a phone call with news she had been waiting almost 36 years to hear, apparently definitive information about what happened to her beloved brother, Maj. Bobby M. Jones, a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who had been missing in action since Nov. 28, 1972, when the jet he was in disappeared from radar near Danang in South Vietnam.

Shirley, chairman of the board of directors of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, was with her mother, 91-year-old Christine Jones, when the call came from the Air Force Casualty Office. Shirley was told a “blood chit” — a military identification marker containing a number specific to her brother — had been found in June by a team led by a forensic anthropologist that was evaluating the site where a plane that was perhaps her brother’s had been excavated 11 years ago.

“It has a number on it and that number is lodged to your name,” Shirley said of the blood chit. “So Bobby would have a number, the pilot would have a different number, and if you come back, then they take that (number) out of the database and I guess they assign it to somebody else.

“If you don’t come back, then that number stays attached to your name until you get a resolution.”

When the blood chit was found, “they called Hawaii, where the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command is located, and said who does this number correlate to,” Shirley said. “And it correlates to my brother.”

Shirley and Christine Jones must still wait for a written report, “and the paper trail will be who knows how long exactly to get that,” Shirley said. But she called the information about the blood chit “huge for us.”

“We know two things,” she said. “We know the two people in that plane — an F4 is a two-seater — did not survive, and that Bobby was one of those.”

When the Air Force Casualty Office representative called, he asked, “Do I need to call mom?” Shirley recalled, “and I said no, she’s actually standing right here baking brownies for the National Guard. She was there, which was good timing, and we both cried.”

Shirley said it was “a huge relief” to finally know for sure what happened to her brother after all the years of family members attending meetings of the National League of Families — at first not knowing exactly what they were getting into — then Shirley taking on a leadership role — she has traveled on four delegations on behalf of families to Southeast Asia — and trying to rally the federal government to ensure an accounting for families similarly situated.

“It was like a big load is lifted off your heart,” she said. “We’ve known for a good while, we have felt this was Bobby’s crash site, and when they told us 11 years ago these two people didn’t survive I think part of the questions about ‘what if this,’ ‘what if that,’ were resolved at that time.

“But this is verification that he’s not a prisoner, he probably didn’t suffer, he was probably killed on impact.”

Still, questions remain.

A more extensive excavation of the site is planned. Asked when, Shirley said, “I have no idea. It could be a year. We have to get back on the schedule, weather comes into play, I don’t want to bump somebody off to get us back on there, so we’ll have to work into their schedule.”

“I have a lot of questions about this particular team and what they found,” Shirley said. “How do you find something that easily that they didn’t find if they did an extensive excavation 11 years ago? My plan is to wait on the report, wait on the excavation. I will talk to the forensic anthropologist at some point one on one even if I have to go to Hawaii to do that because I want to know where did they find this in proximity to where they dug before.”