In September of 2024 it was announced that the remains of Captain James Fitzjames of the Franklin expedition had been identified. This immediately caught my interest. I’ve been fascinated by the Franklin expedition for several years now, but my interest was of a more casual nature. I’d google it a few times a year to check if Parks Canada had posted any new artefacts they’d retrieved. When the weather got cold enough for sun dogs, I'd bunker down and watch The Terror. That kind of thing.
But the Fitzjames announcement really lit a fire. He'd been identified as part of a University of Waterloo study comparing the DNA of Franklin remains to the DNA of their living descendants. Suddenly, inexplicably, I've found myself spending my evenings researching members of the Franklin expedition and trying to find their living descendants in the hopes of contributing to this study as a third party.
I intend to use this blog to post my genealogy research on the sailors that I've looked into, and what I learned about them and their families. My primary goal is to find descendants in a qualifying line for the DNA study; learning about the sailors themselves comes secondary to that. My hope is with more men identified, we'll be able to identify trends and learn more about the circumstances of the expedition's fate.