Toronto ? Nearly a century ago, Canadian sailors buried an unidentified infant who died on the Titanic and, touched by the tragedy, called him the Unknown Child a symbol of all the children who were lost when the luxury liner sank.

Now at last, the child is known. On Tuesday, Magda Schleifer, a retired Finnish bank clerk, visited the grave, which DNA tests have now established holds the remains of one of her relatives.

“First I thought this could not be true,” Schleifer, 68, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Schleifer had long known that her grandmother’s sister, Maria, had died with her five children including her 13-month-old son, Eino Panula when the Titanic went down in 1912, causing the deaths of 1,503 people.

A Finnish survivor had told Schleifer’s grandmother that Maria was offered a seat in one of the Titanic’s lifeboats. “But she refused to leave the boat only with Eino, while her four other children were still in another part of the boat,” Schleifer said.

Now, after two years of study, researchers in Canada have filled in the story, matching DNA remains taken from the grave to Schleifer.

The tests, completed last month, showed that the Unknown Child was Eino, said Dr. Ryan Parr of Lakehead University in Ontario and historian Alan Ruffman of the Geomarine Associates LTD in Halifax.

Of the 150 victims of the Titanic buried in three graveyards in Halifax, 45 remain unidentified.

But grave No. 4 stands out as a symbol of the tragedy’s youngest victims, ever since Canadian sailors erected a stone memorial on it reading, “Erected to The Memory of An Unknown Child.”

When scientists exhumed the remains from the grave last year, they found only a wrist bone, weighing less than a quarter-ounce, and three teeth.

While police generally work with recent DNA samples, analyzing samples almost 100 years old is more difficult.

The Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, on the north shore of Lake Superior, is among the few facilities in the world capable of extracting degraded DNA from old samples, said Jack Ballantyne, a DNA expert from the National Center for Forensic Science in Orlando, Fla.

“Based on my knowledge, it sounds pretty reasonable they have come with accurate results,” Ballantyne said.