Nearly a century ago, Canadian sailors buried an unidentified infant who died on the Titanic and, touched by the tragedy, called him the Unknown Child–a symbol of all the children who were lost when the luxury liner sank.
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, 68, said in a telephone interview from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the infant was buried.
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, killing 1,503 people.
Now, after two years of study, researchers in Canada have matched DNA remains taken from the grave to Schleifer.
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.
