—
## The Remains and Their Resting Place
One final detail from the September 2024 announcement is worth noting.
After the identification was confirmed and the results published, the researchers worked with the relevant authorities to ensure that the identified remains were appropriately commemorated. According to the coverage of the announcement, Fitzjames’s remains were placed in a memorial cairn on King William Island, with a commemorative plaque, alongside the remains of other expedition members from the same site.
The return of the identified remains to a commemorated location on the island where Fitzjames died closed one loop in a very long chain. His letters had been archived and read by researchers for decades. His signature on the Victory Point note had been examined by everyone who studied the expedition’s end. His promotion to captain had been recorded in Admiralty files and noted in biographical accounts. His illegitimate birth and his real family history had been traced by Tetteroo through the obscuring conventions of Victorian record-keeping.
The tooth preserved his DNA. The DNA found his living relative. The science and the genealogy together gave the jaw a name. And the commemorative cairn on King William Island gave the name a resting place.
The expedition that left in May 1845 and never returned has been reconstructed, over 170 years, from the evidence it left behind: the note in the cairn, the artifacts scattered across the island, the accounts gathered from the Inuit who encountered its survivors, the bones in the permafrost, and now, through the technical capacity that modern genetics provides, from the DNA preserved in a tooth in the jaw of the captain who signed the last document the expedition ever produced.