London ? Fingerprint records have confirmed that a man who assumed the name of a dead baby and created a bogus identity as an English nobleman is an American who has been missing for more than 20 years, police said Monday.

Charles Albert Stopford III, a 43-year-old native of Clearwater, Fla., who was arrested in January 2005 and convicted of identity theft, insisted he was born Christopher Edward Buckingham in 1963 and was the Earl of Buckingham, said Detective Sgt. Paul Bratton, of Kent Police in southeast England, the force responsible for his arrest.

That title that has been extinct for more than 300 years.

Stopford’s relatives in Florida said last week that they recognized the mystery man after seeing a story and about him in The Times and his photo on the Internet on Thursday, and U.S. authorities confirmed it by reviewing fingerprints sent to them by police in Britain, Bratton said.