'Our great-uncle's WW1 death reunited us 100 years later'

Article excerpt

A century after Private Thomas Whitaker died in World War One, his remains were finally identified and laid to rest in Belgium, bringing together relatives who had never met. The soldiers killed at the Somme were often buried in mass graves, their identities lost to time. When a commonwealth war grave commission project identified Whitaker through dental records and other evidence, his descendants learned of a family connection spanning generations. The burial ceremony drew distant cousins together for the first time, transforming a grim historical footnote into an unexpected family reunion. It's one of thousands of cases where modern forensics have given closure to descendants of the war's fallen.