Titanic victim identified

2002-11-06 19:12

Toronto - Nearly a century ago, Canadian sailors buried an unidentified infant who died on the Titanic and, touched by the tragedy, they called him the Unknown Child - a symbol of all the children lost in the sinking of the luxury liner.

Now at last, the child is known. On Tuesday, Magda Schleifer, a retired Finnish bank clerk, visited the grave, which DNA tests have now established holds the remains of one of her relatives.

"First I thought this could not be true," Schleifer told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Schleifer had long known that her grandmother's sister, Maria, had died with her five children - including her 13-month-old son, Eino Panula -when the Titanic went down in 1912, causing the deaths of 1 503 people.

A Finnish survivor had told Schleifer's grandmother that Maria was offered a seat in one of the Titanic's lifeboats. "But she refused to leave the boat only with Eino, while her four other children were still in another part of the boat," Schleifer said.

Now, after two years of study, researchers in Canada have filled in the story, matching DNA remains taken from the grave to Schleifer's DNA.

The tests, completed last month, showed the Unknown Child was Eino, said Dr Ryan Parr of Lakehead University in Ontario and historian Alan Ruffman of the Geomarine Associates LTD in Halifax.

Of the 150 victims of the Titanic who are buried in three graveyards in Halifax, 45 remain unidentified. But grave number four has long stood out as a symbol of the tragedy's youngest victims, ever since Canadian sailors placed a stone memorial on it reading, "Erected to The Memory of An Unknown Child."

When scientists exhumed the remains from the grave last year, they found only a wrist bone weighing less than 7 grams and three teeth.

Parr said a copper medallion inscribed with "Our Babe" that was placed in the coffin by the sailors may have helped preserve the bone fragment from oxidation.

"The romantic explanation is that the sailors felt so much for that little boy that they put the medallion (in) to make sure he was preserved long enough for us to find him and identify him," Parr said.

While police generally work with recent DNA samples, analysing samples almost 100 years old is more difficult.

Accurate results

The Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, on the north shore of Lake Superior, is among the few facilities in the world capable of extracting degraded DNA from old samples, said Jack Ballantyne, a DNA expert from the National Centre for Forensic Science in Orlando, Florida.

"Based on my knowledge, it sounds pretty reasonable they have come with accurate results," Ballantyne said.

The identification process focused on mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which is inherited from the mother. A famous case of ancient DNA testing involved Russia's last czar, Nicholas II and his wife, who were killed in 1918. Their remains were exhumed in 1991 and identified a few years later by tests in Britain and the United States.

Parr said it took two years of research to find the name of the Unknown Child.

"When I started, it was the scientific side of the research I was more interested in," he said in a telephone interview. "I thought that after 90 years people would say, `Who cares?"'

Once the testing at Lakehead University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem provided similar findings, Ruffman began searching for living relatives.

Dental tests on the remains established that they were those of an infant, narrowing them down to three of the six unidentified child victims from the Titanic sinking - a 5-month-old Swede, a 7-month-old English child or a 13-month-old Finn.

Helped with funds from U.S. public broadcasters including Thirteen/WNET in New York, which is featuring the find in its "Secrets of the Dead" series, Ruffman sought out people for DNA testing.

While the research still must be reviewed by scientific experts and journals, Parr and Ruffman said they believe they have solved the mystery.

Schleifer said their findings have brought closure to the story of Maria and Eino. Asked if she would like to have Eino's coffin brought to Finland, she said, "Definitely not."

"He belongs to the people of Halifax who took care of him for 90 years," she said. - Sapa-AP

- SAPA