Ottawa ? No one doubted that Lt. Kenneth Hough died when his B-25 bomber crashed during a mission in 1944 in the South Pacific. And when the Army conducted a burial service for him five years later in Nebraska, relatives had to accept that Hough’s remains really lay beneath the marker bearing his name.

But acceptance was tentative at best.

“There was the doubt in people’s minds,” said Mary McAdoo, 73, who remembers the football-playing cousin people in Ottawa knew as Kenny.

Now, thanks to DNA technology, Hough’s remains have been positively identified. They were being returned this weekend to his hometown, for burial next month beside those of his parents and brother at Highland Cemetery.

Many victims of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War are being identified in similar fashion.

Karyn Douthat, 64, said she felt wonderful last spring when the Pentagon called with the news about her uncle.

“We always talked about bringing him home,” said Douthat, who provided the blood sample that led to the identification.

She has no recollection of Hough and said the family never pressed for a search of the crash site or an effort to identify remains. People were more accepting, she said, when soldiers died in World War II.

Hough graduated in 1936 from Ottawa High School and attended Ottawa University — where a yearbook photo shows him as a handsome young man — before heading to World War II with a unit of Ottawa men.

“Everybody was so proud of them,” said cousin Willis Hough, 78, who described his relative as “a good-looking boy.”

Hough went to the South Pacific in 1943, and was serving the following January as a navigator and bombardier on a B-25.

Military records show that on Jan. 20, several B-25’s left the Solomon Islands on a low-level bombing mission in Papua New Guinea. As Hough’s plane left the target area, it rolled into an inverted position and crashed, possibly because of anti-aircraft fire. Other pilots reported flames and a huge column of black smoke. No parachutes were seen.

The Army recovered skeletal remains from the site after World War II, but no individual identifications were made, said Staff Sgt. Erika Gladhill, a spokeswoman for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.

A group burial of what were thought to be six men from Hough’s plane took place in 1949 at Fort McPherson National Cemetery near North Platte, Neb., with some Hough family members in attendance.

But based on a museum curator’s 1983 report about aircraft wreckage in Papua New Guinea, a team from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory pinpointed the crash site and recovered additional remains, Gladhill said. In 1995, she said, bone samples were submitted to another laboratory for DNA analysis.

In Ottawa, Douthat received a call from the Pentagon in 1999 asking for a blood sample.

“I was just amazed,” she said. The retired nurse complied, and finally received a call last spring that her uncle had been positively identified.

Officials at Fort Riley helped coordinate the return of Hough’s remains and will provide a military honor guard at the Oct. 8 service.