Francesco D’Inverno, second right, with Ginevra, centre

THE family of a Clerkenwell man feared lost at sea for more than 80 years have called it a “happy, sad ­story” after they discovered he had actually been in an unmarked grave all this time.

The family was tracked down after Scottish researchers – and the Tribune – launched a campaign earlier this month to find relatives of Francesco D’Inverno, who died in the Arandora Star tragedy during the Second World War.

When the family was contacted they sent a photo of him and his late wife Ginevra to the researchers, and on Friday morning it was pinned to the wooden cross at plot 2209 in Girvan’s Doune cemetery – not visited in eight decades.

The Team at the Girvan and District Great War Project took a picture of the tribute at his grave site and sent it to Charlotte Tasselli Arnold – Fran­cesco’s step-great-granddaughter – who said it was “really big shock”, adding: “The first we knew about Francesco being found was their phone call.”

She said that relatives had been told that he had been on the Arandora Star but never found after it sunk in 1940.

“We just believed that he was lost at sea with many of the others,” Ms Tasselli Arnold said. “So to hear that he was actually found was sad because obviously Ginevra spent her whole life never knowing – but obviously there was just so much comfort in the fact that he was actually laid to rest and he had a Catholic service. It completely changed the ending to the story.”

Francesco, who worked in a hotel, was at home at 57 King’s Cross Road when he was taken away by police and put on the ship.

Italian men were being banished from Britain after Benito Mussolini took Italy into war alongside Nazi Germany in 1940.

In a wartime tragedy largely forgotten except among Anglo-Italian communities, 800 people died when the Arandora Star was hit by a German torpedo. They included Fran­cesco, who was only 38.

Doris Tasselli, 94, who married Ginevra’s son Alfredo, told her granddaughter if Ginevra had known her husband’s body had been found and buried, said would have been “over the moon” – and “she’d have been straight up to Scotland to visit him”.

Instead, the widow was left with unresolved feelings.

The photo pinned to his cross at Doune Cemetery

Ms Tasselli Arnold said: “It’s just so sad. My grandmother said Ginerva would always talk about Frank and it was clearly something that she never, ever forgot about and there was never any real sort of closure for her.”

She added that now the family has finally “got that sort of closure for her” – it was a “happy, sad story”.

Francesco’s Islington life came to light after researchers unlocked an eight-decade mystery about the unknown man buried in Girvan earlier this summer – and then went on the hunt to find his story.

That led to a front-page appeal in the Tribune earlier this month, published in the hope that it might help trace descendents still in the area or anyone connected to St Peter’s Italian Church in Clerkenwell where Ginerva and Francesco first met and where they married in 1939.

Ritchie Conaghan, from Girvan and District Great War Project, said they had received dozens of emails about Francesco from across the country before they tracked down the family through the use of online search engines and support from the public.

Mr Conaghan, who has researched the deaths and final resting places of hundreds of servicemen, said Francesco’s story had been “abso­lutely mind-blowing”.

“We’ve been doing this for a long, long time and researched hundreds and hundreds of guys but I can honestly say this has been the best journey that we’ve been on,” he added. “There was tears last week, on many, many ­levels.”

How the Tribune reported the story on September 8

Ms Tasselli Arnold said she and her family plan to visit Francesco when a headstone is placed at his burial site. A GoFundMe page has been launched to help raise £5,000 for it.

“We want to go up to Scotland and visit altogether to give a sort of blessing to him and do it on behalf of Ginevra because obviously, she never got to do it,” she said. “And, you know, that’s what she would have wanted. We’re just completely overwhelmed by it.”

Describing the length of time it has taken to find him, and the nature of the discovery, she said she believes “he wanted to be found; there’s so many twists and turns to the story”.

She added: “You just feel like it was meant to be, that this is what he was waiting for.”

Children in the family took a copy of a newspaper report about their step great-grandfather into school this week and Ms Tasselli Arnold said the discovery of Francesco had brought the story of the Arandora Star back into the light.

“No one ever taught me about the Arandora Star and all the people that were victims of that, and it is a big bit of history, especially Italian history, and anyone who had descendants in that period of time is affected by that tragic event, but it’s not really spoken about,” she said. “I said to Ritchie the work they’ve done has really, hopefully, reached out to lots of people.”