Identity solved

Ten years ago this May, Ryan Parr began a journey to discover the identity of an unknown child who died in the RMS Titanic disaster in 1912.

While the child was identified as 19-month-old Sidney Leslie Goodwin of England two years ago, the results will be made official in the pages of Forensic Science International this June.

The article chronicles Parr’s – the principal investigator and adjunct professor of anthropology at Lakehead University- story of identifying the child, which began 10 years ago when the remains were exhumed from the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, N.S.

The body was initially believed to belong to a two-year-old Swedish boy, Gosta Leonard Palsson; eyewitness accounts place Gosta with his mother and siblings on the boat deck the night the ship sank.

But there were five other boys the unknown child could have been. Parr and his team used mitochondrial DNA from the remains and tested it against living maternal relatives of each of the six boys.

Based on analysis of the child’s teeth, they believed the boy was Eino Viljami Panula of Finland.

Shortly after deciding the boy was in fact Panula, a pair of shoes belonging to the unknown child were donated to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic by the family of a 1912 Halifax police sergeant.

The officer, who was in charge of burning the clothes of Titanic victims to stop souvenir hunters, didn’t burn the shoes, but kept them in his desk. The officer’s family later donated the shoes to the museum.

The shoes were likely of English origin, Parr said, adding there was no way the shoes would have fit a child the Panula boy’s age.

"It was clear these shoes could not have fit a child that was nine months old," Parr said. "It would have to be a child that was a toddler or a bit older than that. We decided to reopen the investigation and look a little bit further into the DNA."

With the help of the U.S. Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Maryland, the re-examining of the DNA gave a 98.87 per cent certainty the unknown child was in fact Sidney Goodwin.

"This has been a long time coming," said Parr. "The work has been finished for several years but now its just reached fruition with the publication of the results."

Parr couldn’t take all the credit for solving this mystery. He represents a large contingent of researchers and individuals who worked diligently on the project.

For Parr the Titanic tragedy is the stuff of legend because in 1912, it was the technological marvel of its time.

"It was gigantic and man had created this and was it going to set a new transatlantic crossing record? There was a lot of press towards it," he said. "It was just inconceivable that this marvel that had been built by man and populated by the rich and famous of that day could go down with such loss of life and nobody could really do anything about it."