The identification also adds Fitzjames’s name to a confirmed physical record of what happened during the expedition’s final weeks: that the cut marks on his jaw are consistent with cannibalism among the survivors. This confirmation has specific historical significance for the question of whether the British public’s initial resistance to that conclusion — expressed through Dickens’s racist arguments and Lady Franklin’s lobbying to discredit Rae — was itself part of a systematic denial of evidence. The archaeological record at NgLj-2, confirmed across multiple studies and now including the highest-ranking identified expedition member, provides scientific documentation for the conclusion the Inuit had described 170 years ago.
For the families of the other 123 expedition members who have not been identified, the work continues. The identification program has demonstrated that the methodology works — that living descendants can be found, that the DNA can be extracted, and that matches can be established that convert anonymous bone specimens into named individuals. The limiting factor is not primarily scientific capability but genealogical reach: finding the living people who carry the Y-chromosome lines of men who sailed from England in May 1845 and never came back.
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## Epilogue: The Tooth and the Name
A preserved molar extracted from a lower jawbone. A laboratory in Thunder Bay, Ontario. A Y-chromosome profile generated from cells that had been in the Arctic cold for 175 years. A genealogical database search, a handwritten family tree, a living man on another continent who carries a genetic signature laid down by an ancestor who was a naval officer in Regency-era Britain.