David Stonehouse News

Unknown Child's identity remains a Titanic mystery

Despite the body's exhumation, DNA tests have yielded few clues about the baby boy

By David Stonehouse

HALIFAX - In a city heavy with grief, laden with the task of recovering and burying Titanic's dead, the most poignant moments were reserved for a little boy no one knew.

On a sombre Saturday after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank off the coast of Newfoundland, hundreds of folks in Halifax crowded into St. George's Anglican Church to mourn the death of an innocent -- a toddler who became known simply as the Unknown Child.

Pallbearers were six of the crew from the Mackay-Bennett, one of the ships from Halifax tasked with the gruesome detail of pulling perished souls from the icy Atlantic. Although 1,523 passengers died when the Titanic went down, the boy was one of the first recovered.

When his body lay unclaimed, the men from the Mackay-Bennett were so moved that they paid for a special white coffin as well as a tombstone bigger and more elaborate than the simple markers above the graves belonging to other Titanic passengers.

By remarkable coincidence, the boy was buried just a short distance from the grave of a 26-year-old Swedish woman named Alma Palsson, a third-class passenger who many would come to believe was the mother of the unknown child.

Evidence from the day was so persuasive that some Titanic researchers have come to accept pretty much as gospel that the unknown child is Gosta Palsson, a fair-haired two-year-old who perished with the rest of his family when the luxury liner went under on April 15, 1912.

But now, nine decades later, science has declared it not so.

DNA tests carried out at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and Hebrew University in Jerusalem have ruled out a genetic match between the child and a distant, living relative of Alma Palsson.

More than that, analysis of the child's teeth by dental experts have contradicted the long-held belief that the unknown was a two-year-old --showing instead that he was a babe under a year old when he died, perhaps only a few months old.

"It is very surprising that this 'two-year-old child' would be misidentified by 1.5 years. Anyone who has had children knows that there is quite a difference in size between a two-year-old child and a six-month-old child. We don't know how the mistake was made," says Alan Ruffman, a Titanic researcher from Halifax who is part of the team working to identify the mystery child.

A year ago, a team of scientists exhumed the grave of the unknown child along with the burial plots of two other Titanic passengers who are still unidentified -- a quest undertaken at the request of families in Europe and Ontario who are related to victims of the disaster. About 150 lay buried in Halifax, more than 40 are unidentified -- their plots marked only with numbers.

Two of the graves exhumed -- those of a 35-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man -- would share no clues to solving the mystery of their identities.

"We could not use DNA techniques. The acidic waters of the graves had totally dissolved the bone material, so there is nothing left that you can use," says Mr. Ruffman, author of Titanic Remembered: The Unsinkable Ship and a speaker at a convention in Ottawa this past weekend marking the 90th anniversary of the Titanic. "The only grave we got any useable material from was that of the unknown child, which was this small fragment of bone and these three rather immature teeth."

The digging up of the remains, carried out over two days last May, stirred up some controversy in Halifax. Some believed the remains should not be disturbed, including retired rail worker Cyril White. The self-proclaimed caretaker of the unknown child's grave chained himself to the headstone as crews moved in to excavate.

The work, though, went ahead after police came in and convinced Mr. White to unchain himself.

After carefully digging down a little more than a metre, the crew found almost nothing left but a metal plaque that the crew of the Mackay-Bennett placed on top of the coffin. "Our babe," it said.

Underneath the plaque was a sliver of bone only several millimetres long. The plaque had protected the only trace left of the child.

"That plate come to lay against the bone, and the copper salt from the plate infiltrated the bone. Because of that, it preserved the only tiny bit of bone we had left from the burial," says El Molto, director of Lakehead's Paleo-DNA laboratory, which specializes in analyzing ancient DNA samples. "The copper salts preserved it. Another year, I don't think it would have been there."

A blood sample from a woman in Sweden who is a descendant of the Palsson clan was matched against DNA pulled from the bone fragment came up negative. The findings, verified by the scientists at Hebrew University, proved the boy was not the Palsson child. Examination of the teeth revealed no evidence they had erupted or formed roots, which indicates the unknown child was much younger than two.

Historical records declared the mystery boy to be about two years of age after the coroner who examined the body declared it so in his report. Based on that declaration, Titanic researchers narrowed the field of possible identities to a select few children in that age bracket who perished. The strongest possibility, they believed, was Gosta Palsson.

But the testing now suggests that the child was never recovered from the Atlantic.

"The Palssons now know that their long lost babe actually died in the ocean and it is no longer part of the Halifax cemetery," Mr. Molto says." So the unknown child is still unknown -- but less unknown, if you know what I mean."

The more accurate finding also eliminates the possibility that it was other children around the same age as Gosta, such as a British boy named Sidney Leslie Goodwin or an Irish lad, Eugene Francis Rice.

The relatives searching for answers today have largely chosen to remain anonymous. But the Citizen found one -- British innkeeper Des Norton, a distant cousin of Eugene Rice, who had become convinced that his relative was the unknown child. Mr. Norton is uncertain how to react when told otherwise.

"You've caught me off guard," Mr. Norton says. "I really don't know what to say at this point."

For families, finding out where relatives who perished with the Titanic ended up has become a search for closure, a determination to find out exactly what happened to one of their own.

Now the search is on for the living family of younger boys who died aboard the ship, one of which is very likely the unknown child.

The focus for the researchers has now turned to Gilbert Sigvard Emanuel Danbom, a four-month-old Swede who died along with his two parents, and an eight-month-old from England, Alfred Edward Peacock. Alfred perished along with his mother and sister.

A third child from Finland, Eino Viljami Panula, is considered a possibility -- though an unlikely one -- because he was more than a year old.