Five days after the
passenger ship the Titanic sank, the body of a baby boy was found and
recovered from the North Atlantic. Since no one was able to identify the child
he was buried in Nova Scotia along with other victims. There was a
headstone in the grave of the "unknown child" which was
dedicated by the crew of the Mackay-Bennett.
In 2001 researchers at
Lakeland University in Ontario were granted permission to exhume the body. They
got only a 2.4-inch-long (6 centimeter) fragment of an arm bone and three
teeth remained of the unknown child.
An
expert analysis of the child's teeth put his age somewhere between 9 months and
15 months -- seeming to eliminate Goodwin, who was older. So, the researchers
concluded the boy was Panula and, in 2004, published their results.
Sidney
wasn’t properly identified until 2007 after Canadian researchers at Lakehead
University ran DNA tests on the body. His body was first exhumed five years
earlier by scientists, who wrongly identified him as 13-month-old baby Eino
Viljami Panula.
Ryan Parr, an adjunct
professor at Lakehead University in Ontario tried to to verify the child's
identity using genetics. He worked with DNA extracted from ancient human
remains. Parr and his team extracted DNA from a section of
mitochondria that rapidly accumulates mutations, called HV1. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to offspring,
so the team compared the unknown child's DNA sequence with samples from the
maternal relatives of the Pålsson child. These didn't match.
They broadened their search to include five
other boys under age 3 who had died in the disaster. Alan Ruffman, who became
involved in the project as a research associate of the Maritime Museum of the
Atlantic, ultimately tracked down the maternal lines of all six children
with help from genealogists, historians, Titanic researchers, translators,
librarians, archivists and members of the families.
By comparing the unknown child's HV1 with these
other young Titanic victims, the researchers eliminated all but two of the boys
-- Eino Viljami Panula, a 13-month-old Finnish boy, and Sidney Goodwin.
But doubts remained. The U-turn on the
child’s identity came after a Canadian family came forward to donate a pair of
brown shoes to Halifax’s Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in 2002
The family claimed that the
shoes recovered from the unknown child and held in the Maritime
Museum of the Atlantic caused the researchers to question the identification.
The shoes had been saved by Clarence Northover, a
Halifax police sergeant in 1912, who helped guard the bodies and belongings of
the Titanic victims, according to the museum's website. After his death, his
grandson donated it to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in
Halifax. A letter from Northover's grandson, Earle, recounts how the
victim's clothing had been burned to stop souvenir hunters. Clarence Northover
couldn't bring himself to burn the little shoes, and when no relatives claimed
them, he put the shoes in his desk drawer at the police station.
Before he died, Sidney
Goodwin was traveling on the Titanic with his parents, Frederick and Augusta,
and five siblings from England to Niagara Falls, N.Y.
Carol Goodwin, a
77-year-old Wisconsin resident, heard about the ill-fated family from Frederick
Goodwin's sisters, one of whom was Carol's grandmother.
"I can't say that
it really startled me or amazed me," Carol Goodwin said of the news that
the unknown child was her relative. "I guess maybe it had been so long in
coming."
As a child, she learned
about Frederick Goodwin's family by eavesdropping on conversations between her
grandmother and her great aunt.
"They didn't talk
about the children that much," Carol Goodwin told LiveScience. "It
was their brother who was a favorite brother, how kind he was to them growing
up."
Goodwin's interest in
family history didn't spark until her 13-year-old granddaughter Becky saw a
Titanic exhibit and wrote an essay for school. When her teacher wanted to
submit the article to the magazine "Junior Scholastic," Goodwin
wanted to check the facts first.
More advanced DNA
testing was carried out on a tooth from the body and when compared to the DNA
of a surviving Goodwin relative it proved an indisputable match. It confirmed
that ‘the unknown child’ was Sidney Goodwin. Sidney was the youngest of six
children born to Fred and Augusta Goodwin from Fulham, England
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