Infant 'Titanic' victim identified

TORONTO -- Nearly a century ago, Canadian sailors buried an unidentified infant who died on the Titanic, calling him the Unknown Child as a symbol of all the children who were lost when the luxury liner sank.

Now, at last, the child has a name. On Tuesday, Magda Schleifer, a retired Finnish bank clerk, visited the grave, which DNA tests 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.

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 a lifeboat, "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.

After two years of study, researchers in Canada have filled in the story, matching 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 Geomarine Associates in Halifax.

Of 150 Titanic victims buried in three graveyards in Halifax, 45 remain unidentified. But grave No. 4 stands 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 a quarter ounce and three teeth.

Parr said a copper medallion inscribed with "Our Babe" 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 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, analyzing samples almost 100 years old is more difficult.

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 Center for Forensic Science in Orlando.

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

Dental tests established that the remains were those of an infant.

The identification process focused on mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which is inherited from the mother. Parr said it took two years of research to find the name of the Unknown Child.

Asked if she would like to have Eino's coffin brought to Finland, Schleifer said, "Definitely not."

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

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