Unknown soldier no more: World War I gravestone gets a name
A funeral ceremony was held Tuesday for an English soldier who was killed in France in World War I, but whose remains were only identified a century later
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Your support makes all the difference.For more than a century, the British soldier lay in an anonymous grave, one of so many unidentified victims buried beneath the killing fields of World War I.
But now, his headstone finally bears a name: 2nd Lt. Osmund Bartle Wordsworth — a great-great-nephew of English poet William Wordsworth — who was recently identified by DNA research, and given a funeral ceremony Tuesday, 105 years after he died.
A new headstone for Wordsworth, who was killed in action in the Battle of Arras on April 2, 1917, was mounted at his gravesite at a cemetery in Ecoust-Saint-Mein in northern France. A cleric led the ceremony, and a British military attache handed Wordsworth's relatives a carefully folded French flag to place on the grave.
The evolution of DNA technology has allowed for the identification of more and more unknown soldiers from World War I. A service will be held for others in Ypres, Belgium, next week.