NEW ORLEANS -- Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, when the floodwaters had receded and the world sat dripping and quiet, Angel Chauppetta drove to Hopedale to bring her father home.

The storm had ravished the St. Bernard Parish fishing hamlet where 63-year-old Charles Chauppetta lived in a pop-up trailer, which was reduced to rubble. Only the frame of his camper remained. A few personal items -- his tackle box, his bicycle, pieces of Civil War memorabilia -- lay scattered about.

Angel Chauppetta and her brothers looked for their father under the rubble, in the marshes, and out on the water. They screamed his name, posted hundreds of flyers with his image, even painted their contact information on the bare street.

Nothing then. Nothing now.

One year later, Charles "Slim" Chauppetta is one of the 135 people listed as missing in Louisiana. His family still searches for him.

"I still hope to find him," Angel Chauppetta, 40, said during a recent interview in her Carrier, Miss., home. "I just don't know how to look right now."

Hurricane Katrina's official death toll is 1,695 people, 1,464 in Louisiana. The bodies of about 50 others -- about half in New Orleans alone -- have been found in the last year but remain unidentified. Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard said the quest to match bodies with lives would continue until each one had a name.

But it is not easy or neat. The remains have turned up in attics and under destroyed buildings, found by cleanup crews or cadaver dogs. In late May, the skeleton of a male Katrina victim was found near a rear laundry room of a home in Mid-City. In July, more bones were recovered in eastern New Orleans.

Identification is not always as simple as matching where a body was found with its address. Homes left their foundations, and bodies floated for blocks.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, one house is scrawled with, "White man w/ cat," meaning both were dead inside. The African American family living there said they had no idea who the victims were.

Names can be slow in coming. DNA tests take time and more than 1,000 people missing loved ones submitted swabs. Dental and medical records can't always be found, nor can the body parts to compare them with.

This month, officials finally identified 6-year-old Montava Trueblood, who was washed away from his mother in the floodwaters of Aug. 29 and found not far from his home a few months later. Montava, who was positively matched with a DNA sample his mother provided, was remembered a few days later during a memorial service in New Orleans. His mother and younger brother were not there -- they had died in a fire in Wisconsin in December.

Such is the scale of human tragedy here. Just when it seems one story is the worst that could be told, another trumps it. Just when it seems healing is within reach, it floats farther away.

State Medical Examiner Louis Cataldie has estimated that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies will never be found. They disappeared with the floodwaters, lost in the marshes or at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Other missing people may be exploiting that status, eager to start over because of past run-ins with the law or problems with family.

Over the last year, the search for Charles Chauppetta has stretched across Louisiana and into neighboring states, with people sure they have spotted him buying coffee in Mississippi or with his collie, Hungry, in a boat near the Gulf. His children have registered him with every organization they can think of, have called churches, hospitals, even jails in their search.

At least once a week, Angel Chauppetta makes the three-hour drive to Hopedale, scrutinizing the roadside as she drives, convinced that some day she will see him and Hungry ambling along.

She never does.