Their names are known from the expedition’s crew roster. They sailed from England in May 1845. They are buried, in an archaeological sense, at a site on the southeastern coast of King William Island. What is not yet known is which name belongs to which bone.
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## A Resting Place on the Island
After the September 2024 identification was confirmed and published, the researchers worked with the Government of Nunavut and other relevant authorities to ensure that the identified remains were appropriately commemorated. James Fitzjames’s remains — including the mandible with its preserved molar — were placed in a memorial cairn on King William Island, with a commemorative plaque, alongside the remains of other expedition members previously interred there.
The return of identified remains to a named, marked location on the island where the person died closes one of the loops that the identification process opens. The scientific procedure — extraction, profiling, comparison, match, publication — produces an identification that exists as an academic record and a press announcement. The commemorative burial translates that record into something with a physical location in the landscape: a cairn, a plaque, a name attached to a place.
For the families of the other expedition members who have not been identified, the commemorative site on King William Island serves a different function — a collective acknowledgment of the disaster and its human cost that does not require individual identification for each person represented there.
The question of what ceremonies or acknowledgments accompanied the return of the remains is not detailed in the publicly available coverage of the September 2024 announcement. The involvement of the Government of Nunavut in the research partnership and in the management of expedition-related archaeological resources means that the Indigenous communities of the region have a formal role in decisions about how expedition remains are treated, though the specific details of that process for this identification are not described in the sources available.