And they held those little leather shoes. I felt closer to (Fitzpatrick) than some of my cousins – and I love them all.”Īfter the ceremony, the Goodwins did what others have done – they made Fitzpatrick an honorary member of the family. “She was part of everything,” says matriarch Carol Goodwin, 76, of Whitewater, Wisconsin. So when the Armed Forces lab announced in 2008 that Sidney Goodwin was the Unknown Child, Fitzpatrick flew to Halifax for the ceremony. “Not a fairy tale.” They pulled her into the Goodwin’s story and struggle. It’s part of what drives Fitzpatrick, 54, a single woman who provides connections for other families but admits to a distance in her own.įor her, there was something about the shoes: “They came from someone real,” she says. In each Fitzpatrick investigation there comes a time when the dusty archives fade and the people in those records begin to breathe. Through him, Fitzpatrick found two new lines of Titanic-related Goodwins.īut something else was happening at the same time, another kind of turning point. That’s how she tracked down Graeme Goodwin in Australia, who recalled a family story about a shipwreck. They also called Fitzpatrick, who did her usual rummaging through ship manifests, probate records and national archives while cold-calling people around the world. The Armed Forced DNA Identification Lab in Rockville, Md., re-opened the investigation with new rounds of DNA testing. In 2002, when historians said 13-month-old Eino Panula was the Unknown Child, someone looked at the shoes and shook their head – too big for a 13-month old. And because of that, they survived – ending up in the Maritime Museum in Halifax, displayed as the shoes of the Unknown Child. But a cop who was also a father couldn’t bear to destroy those little shoes. To dispel souvenir hunters, all Titanic victims’ clothes were ordered burned. And something about the DNA detective too. Those little leather shoes, hidden for years in a drawer, would say something about the answer. The tiny boy became a symbol for all 53 children who died that night. One of the dead – a child wearing petticoat, frock, socks and leather shoes – was later plucked from the wreckage and buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as the Unknown Child. Within hours, more than 1,500 passengers were dead. In their final moments, the stern lifted from the water, snapped, and both halves plunged into the dark. By the time they reached the deck, the lifeboats were gone and the bow was sinking. When the supposedly unsinkable ship struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, the family was held below with other third-class passengers for nearly two hours. New York, but a coal strike delayed its passage, so they boarded the Titanic instead.
The Goodwins initially were booked on another ship, the S.S. In the course of her research, she learned the tragic family tale. So Fitzpatrick had to reach back a century-and-a-half to the boy’s grandfather and start her search there.
Her job was to find new lines of the Goodwin family to compare their DNA to that in the teeth.īut all eight Goodwins on the Titanic – Mom, Dad and six kids – died. And, as they have before, they turned to a Fountain Valley woman with a pet tortoise, a dented old car and PhD in nuclear physics – DNA detective Colleen Fitzpatrick. Further DNA tests showed that a second boy, 19-month Sidney Goodwin, of England, might’ve been the boy in the grave.
And a graveside ceremony was held for 13-month-old Eino Panula, of Finland. They narrowed the field to six of the 53 children on board. So experts scraped off DNA while dental anthropologists analyzed the teeth under electron microscopes. That’s what historians found in 2001 when they exhumed the famous grave of the Titanic’s “Unknown Child.” New technology, the historians hoped, could identify the boy. Those words led Fitzpatrick into an amazing story of a small boy never meant to board the Titanic a pair of tiny shoes that helped identify him and her own connection to the family of the Unknown Child.
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