From People Magazine online:
November 7, 2002
Titanic Victim Identified 90 Years Later
STEPHEN M. SILVERMAN
Tales of the Titanic never fail to fascinate, and this week a new story surfaced and it's a doozy.
Ninety years ago, immediately following the tragedy, Canadian sailors buried an unidentified infant who perished on the ship, and touched by his fate, dubbed him the Unknown Child -- a symbol of all the children who were lost when the luxury liner sank, the Associated Press reports.
Only now the Unknown Child is no longer unknown. Following DNA tests that have established his identity, on Tuesday, Magda Schleifer, a retired Finnish bank clerk who is related to the child, visited his grave.
"First I thought this could not be true," Schleifer, 68, told the news service in a telephone interview from Halifax, Nova Scotia, near the cemetery where the tiny body was laid to rest.
Schleifer was long aware that her grandmother's sister, Maria, was among the 1,503 people who had drowned when the great ship went down in 1912. With Maria were her five children -- including her 13-month-old son, Eino Panula.
A Finnish survivor had informed Schleifer's grandmother that Maria was offered a seat in one of the Titanic's few 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 studying a fragment of the body's wrist bone and three teeth, researchers in Canada have concluded that the Unknown Child is Eino.
Said Schleifer, after declining when she was asked about possibly moving her relative's remains to Finland: "He belongs to the people of Halifax who took care of him for 90 years."
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