 Great. Well, my name is Maurice Leeson, I'm an Education Ambassador with ISOG, like Debbie. I'm a volunteer that has set up the Genetic Genealogy Ireland Lecture Schedule for this year, and we have a load of volunteers downstairs at the Family Tree DNA stand. So if you are interested in finding out more about buying a DNA test, then please go down and introduce yourself and ask any of the volunteers down there. Today I'm going to be talking about the two mothers-in-baby home and options for DNA testing. This is also going up on the Genetic Genealogy Ireland YouTube channel sometime after the show, so do feel free to look at this again, should you so desire. Now, there has been a huge explosion and revolution in genetics and genealogy in the last 10 years or so, and we really have come a long way in terms of the technology that we use for identifying people. You'll be familiar with Richard III case and the fact that they were able to identify the remains of Richard III from DNA extracted from a skeleton that was found in the car park in Leicester Social Services Department. That was back in 2012, 2011, that type of time. We also have the Formel project from 2009, and I'll be talking about this during the presentation, and this is where they found 250 World War I soldiers, and so far they've been able to identify the majority of those soldiers, and again DNA played a very large part in that particular project which started in 2009 and is still ongoing in terms of the identification process. The other big thing that we will be talking about is the huge advances being made in ancient DNA, many of them here in Ireland itself. And it serves to just emphasize that we have a huge amount of technical expertise within Ireland. Here is Professor Dan Bradley who runs an ancient DNA lab in Trinity College Dublin. This was one of the sets of remains that they found on Rathlan Island, and it dated to 3000, 4000 years ago, and this paper was published in 2016 reporting on four ancient Irish genomes, and since then they have gone up to 100. And we're going to be hearing from Lara Cassidy later on today about what the analysis of the DNA from 100 ancient Irish genomes is telling us. So this serves to illustrate the speed of advancement in this technology. And certainly the ancient DNA labs have taught us a huge amount about what is now possible in terms of extracting DNA from historic remains, from ancient remains, including the remains that are at Tuam. We also had Jens Carlson here two years ago talking to us about the identification of Thomas Kent. And he was moved from Cork to... He was moved from Cork Prison where he was interred in an unmarked grave. They knew roughly where he had been buried, but they used novel techniques using autosomal DNA to actually identify Thomas Kent. And that particular presentation is up on the Genetic Genealogy Ireland YouTube channel, Well Worth a View. So the mass grave at Tuam has been known since the 1970s because children playing on the housing estate that has now been built around the old site of the mother and baby home, they found a pit and they looked into the pit and they found that there were skeletons in the pit and the skeletons were very small and they would have been children. So then in 2014 Catherine Corless, a local historian, she did a project on the old home and she found that there were 796 children who died in the home between 1925 and 1961 and there was no record of where they were buried. So the question is, were the 796 children who definitely died in the home, are they buried in that pit that was found on the housing estate on the old site of the home? So this is where the pit lies, it lies under the grass here and you can see that the locals have put up a little memorial here in the corner with the statue of the Virgin Mary and some flowers. So underneath all of this grass is where the pit lies with these children's remains and you can see a little memorial here in the memory of those buried here rest in peace. So when this hit the headlines then, there were a lot of various headlines that the fact that the pit was a disused sewage pit was mentioned. The T-shock of the day, Anna Kenny, made a very, very strong statement in the door saying we took their babies and we gifted them, sold them, trafficked them and starved them. Other headlines included the next steps in finding the truth behind their deaths because the death rate in the tomb mother and baby's home was twice the rate in other mother and baby homes around the country. So why was that? And that still is a question that desperately needs to be answered. It's so important we get this inquiry right. The mixing of remains will make it very difficult to identify babies at tomb sites and that particular headline and story made people think that it was impossible to identify these babies when in actual fact that is not the case. It just is another challenge to be overcome. And then in April of this year several DNA experts including Professor Dan Bradley and Jens Carlson wrote a letter to the Irish Times and maybe several other local and national newspapers saying that DNA technology does now make it possible to identify these children at a tomb. So the names of all 796 people have been published and they're on the internet. You can also research them as well because the first one on the list is a Patrick Derein and you can go to a website like irishgeniology.ie and you can actually research this particular person. There is his death record and you can see on his death record that he died on the 27th of August 1928. His name was Patrick Derein, he was male, a bachelor, 5 months old, son of a farmer. How did they know that this illegitimate child was the son of a farmer? Probably because the farmer is actually paying for his upkeep in the home. And a lot of people in the tomb mother and babies home, the children did not come from underprivileged backgrounds, they came from middle class backgrounds and so a lot of the times their upkeep would have been sustained by a member of the local community. He died of gastroenteritis which he'd had for 2 months. The informant was Sister Hortens and you see that on a lot of the death certificates with Sister Hortens was the person that registered the death and her address is the children's home in Chum. So that's the kind of information that you can get on the Irish genealogy publicly available data. So there was a huge social stigma of course associated with illegitimate children back in Ireland which was perpetuated up until the present day. Family trees can be constructed but only on the mother's side because this death certificate doesn't tell us anything about the father apart from the fact that he was a farmer. So we don't actually know who the father was but we might be able to assume that Doreen was the name of the mother and that's why he was called Patrick Doreen. Now that may not be the case. Maybe it was the name of the father but for most illegitimate children they took the name of the mother rather than the father. Chum Home Survivors Network issued a press release in January of this year and there's three interesting items. Number three, number five and number six. Let's see if I can underline them. Yes, number three. The members of the network said that the appropriate actions need to be taken and they recommend recovery and relocation to be undertaken with all the expertise and resources necessary to preserve as possible the individual identity of each set of remains because as humans decompose the bones tend to become separated so it's important when you're trying to exhume individuals that you try to retain the integrity of the skeleton and keep the bones together. The second point they make is the taking and cataloging of DNA from all the remains to create the most complete database possible so creation of a database and the third an invitation to be extended to all those who have reasonable grounds to believe that members of their family may be buried at the Chum site to provide their DNA so it's the creation of a comparative DNA database. It's interesting that they've just kind of honed in on those people who have reasonable grounds to believe that they have a relative buried there and we'll come back to that because it is a very specific sub-sample of the entire Irish population. So these are the current objectives of the Chum Home Survivors Network that are relevant to DNA testing, preserve the individual identity of each child, create a database of all the children's DNA, all the children in the pit and invite selected families to provide DNA for comparison. So that was in January. Then in, when did this report come out? October 2017, this is when it was finalised but we had the technical report on the Chum site from a technical expert group and it's a very large report tuned to 19 pages long with many very useful portions and it is a very, very, it's a great read actually. They have some excellent recommendations here that I think a lot of people in the press but also possibly in government have overlooked but there's a lot of very good recommendations within this report. They describe the type of approach to examining the remains in the pit and Chum as humanitarian forensic action. So this is going to be undertaken by a forensic company but it's not necessarily treated as a crime per se. It's a humanitarian forensic action, the same type of action you'd undertake if there was a plane crash and you were trying to identify the bodies on this crash site. So there are multiple challenges that they identified. They repeated on many occasions that a pilot study would have been preferable before the publication of the report but they were under pressure to actually get it done. So since then I think they have done a pilot study but I haven't seen that information publicly released as yet. They also talked about how it is important to have a multidisciplinary body to implement the strategy. They make the point that forensic genetics is non-standardised. There's no standardised way of doing this investigation and every time there is a new mass grave and they come in and they do this humanitarian forensic action they discover something new and the technology advances with every single case. So you're looking at a state where the technology is changing and evolving all the time and if we do it at Chum this will help the evolution of forensic genetics as well. Now, so there's been many recent advances. I think many of the suggestions in this report were actually possibly ignored by government. I think the public consultation that took place after this was published was premature and the public did not have enough information to make an informed decision about what they felt was the best way forward. But in 2017 they did a geophysical survey at the Chum baby site and it did detect remains within the pit. So this is what it looks like now. We've taken off the grass and the pit is lying there, it's been cordoned off. Here it is on an old map overlaid on a current version of Google Maps. You can see that this is the area, the grassed-in area and the pit lies underneath that particular area there and here in Outline you see the old buildings of the mother and baby's home and this is the estate that has popped up all the way around it. So the site is actually hemmed in, if I go back to the last slide, it's hemmed in on all sides by people's gardens making it quite difficult to access this particular site. But there is a sizable portion of the expert technical report that describes how excavations could take place and the take-home message is it's difficult but it's possible. There are 20 underground chambers within the larger pit which measures about 12 metres by 2 metres. There are bones present in 17 of the 20 chambers and it has been previously entered. So there are reports from the locals about how children got in there or people were accidentally fell in or were pushed in for a joke and so that raises the question that is there contamination within the pit from other people that have actually entered it? At Formel, they exhumed 250 sets of remains and this is what it looked like. You can see everybody's wearing their crime scene investigation-type suits and they catalogued every single thing. Now they could use the same kind of suits in Tuam or they might have to use whole body suits and that means that they look like a deep-sea diver with the tubes going in and they can only stay in those suits for 40 minutes at a time and then they have to get out, take a break and then go back in again. So it may very well be that they'll have to wear these whole body suits. Again, it's just an extra level of complexity that can be overcome with modern technology. All the artefacts will be logged, the chain of custody established, the possible recovery team might include a forensic archaeologist, a forensic anthropologist who will be looking at things like the height and the sex and the age of the remains looking for any fractures, any evidence of bone disease that could possibly tell us the cause of death. It may also involve a historian, a photographer, a project manager and the genetic side of the team may include a forensic geneticist, maybe even a genetic genealogist and also a statistician. Other people on the team may include experts in ethics because ethics play a huge role in this type of project. This is how the soldiers at Formel were catalogued. So before even removing anything you're drawing diagrams of the sets of remains and the positions that they're in. The position of the remains are recorded. Every individual bone is mapped. Are some of the remains going to be intact? Will they be disassociated and the bones scattered? It very much depends on was the sewage pit active for some of the time that the children were in there and it may be that it was active between 1925 and 1937 but between 1937 and 1961 it may have not been used as a sewage pit per se. So the challenges are to recover the intact individual remains and to rebuild individuals from scattered bones. So DNA may help because you can test individual bones and find out which person it belongs to but it may be too destructive. So for example in the case of Richard III they used a molar tooth and there's a YouTube video showing how they processed that molar tooth and it meant pulverizing the tooth first turning it into a powder and then taking the powder and extracting the DNA from that particular powder. So the question is where do we draw the line? How many bones need to be reconstituted with an individual? And that's an ethical question that will need to be discussed by the multidisciplinary team that does this work. Here's a site of the Formel dig which you can see that there's eight mass graves indicated beside the wood and they created this temporary lab and temporary mortuary where all the remains were laid out, and then they would extract the tissue sample for later DNA analysis there on that makeshift lab. So we do the same kind of thing at Tuum and there in the yellow circle is the actual pit and you can see that there are fields nearby and it may very well be that there will be a procession of activity from the housing estate to a nearby field for the laboratory lab and mortuary. So how can DNA help? It can help in three different ways. First of all the identification of individuals the reunification of bones and the discovery of trafficked children because there's no guarantee that those death certificates were real and we know from recent stories that a lot of them would have been faked and the child would have been sold to an American couple for example. So that's what Peter Mulrion is concerned about because when Catherine Corliss found that he had a sister who apparently died in the home the big question was did she really die in the home or was she actually sold to an American couple and adopted in America? So this is a very important question that people need to have answered and if you want to find out if your relative was trafficked do the Ancestry DNA test download a copy of your results to your computer and then upload it to Family Tree DNA, MyHeritage, LivingDNA Jetmatch and if you don't find the answer there then do the 23andMe test which is a separate company you will be putting yourself in touch with 20 million people. The databases are roughly around about 20 million people now so like Debbie said in her first presentation there's a very very good chance that you will find if your relative is adopted by an American couple and has done a DNA test you will find them in by doing this technique so test with Ancestry transfer to all the other companies if you don't find them there test with 23andMe Individualization is the second way that DNA can help and there are ethical issues here as well which DNA tests will suffice? Do you do the forensic tests and we'll look a little bit about them later on or do you do more formal tests like the ones we do for genetic genealogy some of the smaller bones will be destroyed by the testing so does it make sense to test the smaller bones if you can't then reunify them because they've been destroyed? Where do we draw the line? What to do with them if they can't be reunified and rejoined with their owner? So there's a need for expert specialist advice and the multidisciplinary board should include an ethicist some of these questions and then again who makes the final decision? Is it the board? Is it done publicly? Is it done privately? These are all questions that need to be addressed So when we come to taking DNA from the actual samples there is a process that we use first of all you need a tissue sample and this in living people we do a cheek swab we get a little tube in deceased people you're looking at maybe a tooth or a bone the Petrus bone at the back of the skull just behind your ear is the hardest bone in the body and you get the best yield of DNA from this particular bone DNA extraction two elements here the quantity and the quality and we look at here we look at those issues as well the testing DNA, Y DNA, father father father mitochondrial DNA, mother mother mother autosomal DNA but also the two types of DNA marker the STR marker and the SNP marker and the three approaches to DNA testing the forensic approach the commercial approach which is the tests that we do and then the ancient DNA approach then we need to actually create a comparative DNA database and that means either using anti-mortem samples targeted individuals or the general population which may be a forensic general population or a jet match general population we'll look at that and then to establish the identity of the person you can never be absolutely sure that you have identified the right person we'll see with Richard III that they were 99.9994% positive that it was Richard III and the same with Thomas Kent as well but I'll show you a little bit of evidence about that and again, what threshold should you use for identification do you need to be 99% positive 95% positive what's the threshold that we choose for saying this person is definitely then these remains belong to this named person so these are the kind of issues that we face with the whole process but let's look at the tissue sample first and here is Kendra Sirac from University College Dublin she developed a new method of understanding DNA testing and she developed a new method of extracting DNA from the Petrus bone that is minimally destructive to the remains this is technology that was developed in Ireland just to emphasise again we have the technology within Ireland to do the right thing the DNA extraction depends on quantity and quality because once you get your tissue sample and you know there's DNA in that tissue sample the question is will you be able to extract DNA from that sample there's two problems here the first problem is that DNA fragments after death so you only have these small short segments and environmental conditions are very important about how rapidly the DNA degrades age is less of a problem but this fragmentation can be very problematic for the forensic STO based tests because they may not be able to test to detect this fragment of DNA I said age is less of a problem because we were able to extract DNA from Neanderthals that were 38,000 years old but on the other hand Titanic 1912 100 years ago three graves were exhumed in 2001 there were no human remains left in two of those three graves because the ground was actually very waterlogged and water speeds up the degradation process so you can have DNA surviving for 38,000 years or bones surviving for 38,000 years you can have bones gone within 100 years so what are the conditions going to be like in the pit in a tomb DNA can remain intact for a long time decay rapidly depending on the environmental conditions the best conditions are cool dry conditions and that's why you find a lot of the Neanderthals would have been buried in the back of caves where the conditions were very very conducive to the survival of their bones many remains at tomb may be gone because apparently it was active as a sewage pit until 1937 so for those years between 1925 and 1937 there may be no bones left so that might be a substantial proportion of the children's remains won't have survived the other thing to keep in mind of course is that because it's a sewage pit the soil in that sewage pit may be quite acidic and you all probably have heard about the bog bodies that are found in the bogs from time to time impossible to get DNA out of them at all because the acid is very good for preserving the skin but it destroys the DNA completely so those bog bodies in the National Museum of Ireland they weren't able to get DNA from them at all moving on to the type of DNA testing there are three main types of DNA like I say the Y DNA goes back along the father, father, father side it's useful for establishing a connection on that direct male line father, father, father up son, son, son down the mitochondrial DNA does exactly the same on the other side of the family tree the mother, mother, mother line going up and a mother, mother, mother line going up from the match the mother up, daughter, daughter, daughter daughter coming down autosomal DNA is the third type of DNA and that tests all of the chromosomes apart from the Y chromosome which is the father, father, father line so tests all of the other chromosomes and that is the most useful from a genealogical point of view the Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA good for deep as well as recent ancestry but autosomal only useful for recent ancestry going back about 5, 6, 7 generations and that of course would be within the time period for the children at TOOM two types of DNA marker just so you're aware of it here we have the double helix of the DNA it's on raveling and then you've got the two strands one is a mirror image of the other so that's why you see DNA code just written as a string of letters because on the other strand it's exactly the opposite mirror image G always binds with C A always binds with T this gives us two types of DNA marker the STO marker is a short tandem repeat TAC TAC so TAC is repeated three times the value for that marker is three that's where you get the numbers from the single nucleotide polymorphism is a single substitution it might have been a G in the father and now it's an A in the son so an STO is a string of letters a SNP is a single letter those are the two types of DNA marker and both of them are used both in forensics and also in genetic genealogy so what are the options for degraded DNA you can use standard forensic tests you can use chip based technology like we do for genetic genealogy just like the test you do at Ancestry or Family Tree DNA or you can use whole genome sequencing which is now what they're using in Professor Bradley's lab in Trinity College Dublin in Professor Ron Pinhassi's lab in the University College Dublin as well so we have two ancient DNA labs within Dublin itself and they are very much on the forefront of promoting these new technologies so these are the kind of tests that you could do I just want to draw your attention to the fact that the forensic tests use maybe 23 STR markers and on the Y DNA we use 111 on the STRs 85,000 or more on the SNPs there is an order of magnitude different difference between the forensic tests and the genetic genealogy tests mitochondrial DNA they can use full mitochondrial sequence so can we on its own DNA they use a 17 panel STR marker we use 700,000 which means that these tests that we use for genetic genealogy are much more able to detect relationships that are second cousins third cousins fourth cousins whereas the forensic autosomal tests these ones here will identify a child identify a parent perhaps identify an uncle or an aunt but that's as far as they will go very very difficult to detect a first cousin first cousins is practically impossible with a forensic DNA test so major advances in ancient DNA have informed what is now possible technologically and I think in the future what's going to happen is that with these type of humanitarian forensic actions we will be doing either whole genome sequencing like Professor Bradley is doing in his lab in Trinity or we'll be doing a SNP based test and Professor David Reich in Harvard University over in Cambridge in America he is developing a chip which tests about 1.2 million SNP markers and that may very well lower the cost of doing this type of investigation quite considerably we had a meeting with one of the commercial companies recently and they reckoned that in the TUM case they could extract autosomal DNA using their chip which has 700,000 markers on it for somewhere between 500 and 1,000 euro per case so if there's 796 individuals that's going to be 500 to 1,000 per 796 individuals you're looking at about 800,000 euro which is not going to break the bank it actually is economically feasible to test these children looking at the DNA for comparison so we have now extracted DNA from all these children what do we compare them to? you can compare them to an anti-mortem sample for example in the case of Princess Anastasia where the individual who claimed to be Princess Anastasia and who had died many years before they were able to once the DNA technology had evolved they were able to go and get a sample of tissue that had been removed from her from the local hospital test that for DNA and compare it to the DNA of Prince Philip who is also on the direct female line with Princess Anastasia it proved that there was no match whatsoever and it proved that this lady who claimed to be Princess Anastasia was not in fact Princess Anastasia you can also target individuals and at Formel we knew that the 250 missing soldiers belonged to a list of 1,650 but the question is which of the 1,650 are the 250 we found in the pit and so what they did was they collected, they traced the families of all 1,650 people and they collected DNA samples from each of those families and compared it to the soldiers DNA that they had collected so they needed 6,600 donors to identify 250 soldiers challenging but doable the third type of reference database you can use is a reference database from the general population and that might be either a forensic database like the CODIS database or it could be GEDMATCH which is the public database we use for genetic genealogy and that has now about 1.2 million people in that particular database then once you've got your comparison you can establish the identity what do you need to do well with Richard III we targeted his descendants we found Wendy Dildig and Michael Ibsen and doing an analysis of his mitochondrial DNA we just we were able to determine that this was these were the remains of Richard III with 92% probability based solely on his mitochondrial DNA but when you take all the other evidence into account the scoliosis the crooked back they came to the conclusion that these were the remains of Richard III with 99.9994% probability and this is described in great detail by John Reid in a wonderful lecture that he gave at Who Do You Think You Are a couple of years ago and that is up on YouTube as well so if you want to see the Bayesian probability statistics that were used to determine the probability of the likelihood ratio of this being Richard III then please look at John Reid's video in Formel they used a slightly different approach because they had to they were collecting DNA from 1650 families and they were collecting two Y DNA samples from each family and two mitochondrial DNA samples from each family the reason it was two was because they knew that there was a risk of adoption within the family so they couldn't rely just on one Y DNA sample and in fact they found that within the sample of 1650 families there was a 2% incidence of adoptions or illegitimacy within these families if they couldn't find an informative Y DNA donor on say the soldiers if the soldier didn't have any male brothers then they went up a generation to see if he had any male first cousins and we have something here this is oh the battery is lovely thanks very much and if they didn't find it at the at the generation above then they'd go up a generation further so for some of these soldiers they had to go back to the 1800s in order to actually identify informative DNA donors and then what they used was a combined probability measure to decide whether this was likely to be the soldier using the Y DNA had to match and the mitochondrial DNA had to match and using that technique they were able to get odds of something like the chances of it being a chance match are 1 in 64 million so that's the kind of statistics that they did for Fremel but of course we can't do that at TUM because we don't know who the father was so therefore we've got no way of tracing the father's family we could trace the mother's family assuming in the example I gave Patrick Durain we're assuming that the Durain referred to the mother's surname rather than the father's surname so there are problems using this technique with the children at TUM but the technology has moved on and major advances have been made since Richard III and since Fremel and again a lot of it was spearheaded by the ancient DNA labs Professor Dan Bradley's lab and this was the paper that I mentioned before the whole genome sequencing looks at 3 billion letters not just 700,000, 3 billion letters in every on your genome and this started in 2012 and because it's getting more advanced the price and the cost of doing this type of testing is coming down all the time Jens Carlson of course we mentioned previously analysed the long lost remains of the executed 1916 Rev. Thomas Kent and his presentations on the Genetic Genealogy Ireland YouTube channel and here is some actual data from Professor Bradley's paper on these first four ancient DNA genomes and the things that just to this is very technical but the coverage they managed to get 10 times coverage deep coverage for two of the samples and around about one times coverage for the remaining two and that was a pretty good result they were able to establish mitochondrial and Y-haplogroups and then with Thomas Kent they managed to get 26% human DNA from the samples the rest was bacterial DNA in the soil bacteria they had a very low read depth usually only one read per sniff same as these ones here there was virtually no heterozygotes so they analysed the whole thing as homozygotes as a half genome and that had to change that changed the numbers the percentages they used for the statistical analysis but the odds that the identification was wrong was less than one in a million and the likelihood ratio was 5 trillion to one more likely that he's related to the Mises than not so they didn't have any informative mitochondrial DNA they only had two Mises and they were only related on the autosomal lines now we also had Buckskin Girl in April of this year and this started this whole revolution of low enforcement use of DNA on JEDNATCH and this was the identification of Marcia L. King the case was taken on by the DNA DOE project and they managed to extract blood 37 year old blood sample from 1981 this particular girl was found murdered at the side of the road and nobody knew who she was for 37 years this blood sample remained in the custody of the police without being refrigerated so they managed to extract DNA from an unrefrigerated blood sample from 37 years ago they then sequenced that DNA they spoofed a kit created a spoof kit and loaded that up to a JEDNATCH in fact they did this several times because this was all new technology they weren't sure how it was going to work but though I don't know whether it was 10 or 20 or more spoof kits that they did but every single kit was able to identify the same close matches on JEDNATCH and as a result of that they were able to detect a first cousin once removed match they found a tree on Ancestry that was associated with that particular email address and within 4 hours they had identified who this person was so it took 37 years for forensic science to throw everything at this case and fail and 4 hours for genetic genealogy to answer the question and that really is a very very important illustration of the power of genetic genealogy to help solve these type of cases they contacted her mother and her mother hadn't changed her address and hadn't changed her phone call because she was hoping for the last 37 years that she would get a phone call from her daughter and say that everything was okay so the take home messages are that there have been major major recent advances in DNA technology the extraction of autosomal DNA is very possible and we have that technology here in Ireland sufficient SNP profiles can be generated for comparison with samples from living people whether they're targeted relatives like we did at Formel and Richard III or whether it's from the general population using a database like JEDMATCH the approach is very similar to what has been done by the commercial direct to consumer companies and JEDMATCH DNA from a prospective family can be compared against the entire database of the DNA of the children in the grave at TUM and a list of matches can be generated and identification is possible based on those matches there are ethical issues surrounding identification before qualifying for DNA comparison people must have reasonable grounds to expect to be related this is what is recommended by the TUM home survivors network but what are those reasonable grounds where do we draw the line a first cousin a second cousin who decides who qualifies is there going to be an ethics committee involved what if some family members do want to test and some don't how do you resolve that ethical conflict there's a very important additional question is there a case for identifying all the children in this grave in TUM and not just the children of those families who come forward saying I think I've got a child can you take my DNA and compare it to the children's database because TUM is wider than just the locality it actually is important for every single person in Ireland and every single person globally as well because what happened at TUM may very well have happened in other mother and babies homes around the country and it raises important questions like do all the children deserve to have their name on their gravestone I would say they probably do but again where do you draw the line because if you go back maybe 60 years from TUM to the famine how do we approach the famine graves do those people deserve to have their names on their gravestones or is the famine so far back in history that we're prepared to forget about it in terms of actually identifying individuals I don't know the answer to that question do the families involved deserve to have their privacy protected absolutely but to what extent because if we are is there an element of trying to hide again from the truth and is this a vestigial remains of the stigma still operating today so those are very very difficult questions to answer and I certainly don't have any answer to that particular question could the identification be done without publicity I think absolutely we can do it privately and create the necessary safeguards so it's done outside of the media glare using JEDMATCH to identify the children is another option so you're using a public database to identify all the children in the pit again spoof kits could be generated just like they did with Buckskin Girl and Golden State Killer the file uploaded to JEDMATCH in the usual way do we compare it to the entire JEDMATCH database or do we create our own opt-in database for comparison purposes the match is generated for each child then some of them will have trees on JEDMATCH some will have trees on Ancestry, MyHeritage, Genie some can be contacted for genealogical information if need be the identity of the child can be deduced and then confirmed by subsequent targeted testing of suspected families but is that a step too far just because it's technically possible just because we can do it doesn't mean we should do it and that's where the ethical dilemma arises and we've been using this technique with adoptees for the last eight years this is what JEDMATCH looks like it's a public database there you can see the total amount of DNA shared there's the largest segment there tells you whether there's a match on the X chromosome there's emails for contacting people you can see my email there most of these names well some of these names are pseudonymized so that you can't tell the exact identity and then you can see here that some people have JETCOM you click on that and you can get the family tree so what kind of relations should we expect what family members will come forward we might get a parent coming forward it's possible because it was up until 1961 so the parent could be born in the 1940s so they may still be alive and if their DNA is put into JEDMATCH then you'll get this kind of prediction that 100% chance is apparent if it's a sibling again you can put the DNA in and it comes back 100% chance it's a sibling if it's a half sibling it detects that as well it'll also detect nephews and nieces it'll go to first cousins and now we are beyond the realms of forensic DNA testing it'll also go to second cousins and it'll give you a prediction of the likely relationship so probabilities for each relationship can be calculated statistically and this is the power of genetic genealogy over forensic genetics the last ethical issue is memorialization what happens to the remains after you've extracted the DNA done the testing and completed the post-mortem inquest are they buried? are they put in storage? that's something that the multidisciplinary body will need to decide and where are they buried? do the gravestones have a DNA ID number and no name and the name can then be added at a later stage if identified and that's the technique that they used in Formel and at Formel they built a purpose-built cemetery for the 250 soldiers buried them and then as identifications occurred and they've identified 159 of the 250 soldiers so far as identifications occurred you can see here that the gravestone was changed from a soldier known on to God to a soldier with his actual name and identity written on his gravestone we can do exactly the same thing in Tuum give an unknown child gravestone and change it as identification occurs to a named individual and thereby giving the children a dignity in death that they probably did not have in life so I need to acknowledge the amazing work of Catherine Corliss who I've spoken to on a few times on the phone John Cleary who's here as well who's done some great work with the ancient DNA Debbie Cannon of course as well Martin Curley who lives in the Galway area I've had some conversations with him Professor Bradley and Janice Carlson about the work they do with their teams and the ancient DNA labs and of course the expert technical group who wrote that very very useful report that I would encourage you to all read it's freely available and then my ISOC colleagues for the many discussions we've had on Facebook about a lot of the issues involved in this particular case so I will leave it at that and say thank you very much for your kind attention now we do have time for a few questions so I'm going to ask Donna would you be kind enough to move the microphone around that would be great that lady over there Hello I've gone crazy to come in my name is Anna Corrigan and I belong to the June babies family group and we have 11 family members buried in this pit so we seem to be getting sidelined here we're not mentioned we are an active group and we've been active for quite a long time we have half siblings in there we have aunts we have cousins in there so we seem to be as I say as ministers Paul has called us stakeholders I mean how we become stakeholders in our own family is beyond belief now the grave does exist because running in town with Catron's research in 2013 I got a letter from the Bonsecours stating that the grave did exist despite what Terry Prone said I put one of the young lads in touch with Catron Barry Sweeney he's a friend of mine and he had found the bones now they're the same bones I don't know regarding the expert technical group report I mean there was a report to that sent in by the expert team in UCD it was sent in by Jens Karatsen because Jens Karatsen was of the mind that the DNA can be extracted from the Petrus bone it doesn't matter the commingled state of the bones because you only have one skull this is the cut and edge technology he said it can be done at a very cheap rate he's already done it with the Thomas Kent thing this again is being ignored Dan Bradley came on board David McHugh they all put their submission into ministers of bone because we know for a fact from the report that was written by the expert technical group it's not a valid report it sidelines a lot of issues they won't use up-to-date current technology I spoke to the DNA expert involved I asked him and I asked him about Jens Karatsen's work and he said I said why did you not apply that to June so we've also got rights here under the Carners Act which people are forgetting this is all nice and tidy and everything else I have two brothers and they're the subject of two open police inquiries and one of them is marked as dead in the ledgers of the home despite the fact that he's not on the list that Catherine compiled of the names and I also have another brother who's the subject of an open police inquiry that he died in neglect and malnutrition because I have the paperwork which I gave to Catherine now you're talking about the ethics here I mean before we ever get to the ethics the names are already up in the public arena Catherine anybody can walk and get a copy of that list because their name, their date of birth is on it, they can go into the GRO they can secure a copy of that person's birth certificate because there's no restriction on it it would show the mother's name the plaques have already been done they were put together by the graveyard committee in Chum and they're sitting in Mayo that was the last I heard of them so all these names are out there following Catherine's research so there is no ethical issue here I think one of the things that struck me about the Chum Home Survivors Network press release was the fact that there was there seemed to be, understandably the families in the surrounding area that gave the children up for to be put into the home is it is there a risk there that people will name and shame them well first off I don't speak on behalf of the Chum Survivors Network we're the Chum Babies family group again we're being sidelined right we've been around a long time nobody will interact with us because we actually have family members in the grave now when you put your child into the home that name is never going to come out we're only looking at the names of the children that have actually died which are already out in the public arena so there is no taking them back, they're already out there the plaques were ready to go up just before the breaking of the story by Alison O'Reilly from The Mail on Sunday which when I brought the story to her right we have absolute rights here because this is a criminal scene right, I mean I spoke you talked about the box populi that was done by the Goawe County Council on foot of Catrons and Ponds I spoke to the Dublin City Coroner and I asked him where in the world following the find of human remains would you go to the public at large and in this case it wasn't the public at large they came to Dublin and they went to Chum with a distinct agenda of what they wanted to do would you ask the public what would you do with the find of human remains he said nowhere so I said I go home now and I find bodies buried in my backyard and I'll go to the shop where you should like grow some roses over them not a hope in hell now also regarding this expert technical group report we know they use the wrong technology because I have been liaison with the experts behind the scenes that put the rebuttal in now again this is all getting very very confused out in the arena we have family members in the grave we have rights, Dan Sue Black said every child under 18 is entitled to an identity, there's case law in the European courts that could be based, that we have rights that those children have rights you know once again if you're saying don't save a child's name we have the same issue with people who are illegally adopted we have the same issue with people who were adopted tell them nothing keep them in the dark these names are all out there for clarification and these names are not secrets so that blows the issue of the ethics in that respect out of the window we have 11 family members in the grave we are in type to know what happened to our family and again sorry as I said the children survivors group they speak on behalf of survivors they have one member there to the best of my knowledge which is Peter now as I said we don't have any angst but I'm just saying we do have actual so I would like to get that message out because we are being held back, we are being sidelined we're being pushed into obscurity but we do have family members I have two brothers, Annette McKay has a sister Professor Thomas Garavan has an aunt I have another lady Rita I'll only give you our first name who has a sister and a brother in there I can go on I have a person who has two cousins in there and we're all just waiting jumping at the bit to be recognised to be acknowledged to get our rights under law to have the DNA testing done not to have to read the expert technical group report we want to read the report that Professor that was put in by Jens Karatsson two ministers on foot of our X marks so we have rights and we want our rights established cool, thanks very much for your comments I think that it is very important that we have these kind of public discussions I think it's very important that the message gets out there that we have the technology and that's why the fact that this is being broadcast on Facebook live as we speak is one way of getting the message out and the fact that this presentation is actually going to go up on the YouTube channel is another way of spreading the words and hopefully serves to inform general public opinion now unfortunately we're out of time but Barbara you're next to you yeah so Barbara is the next speaker no that's fine but you'll be interested in Barbara's talk because Barbara is the person that actually identified the golden stapler in California using these exact techniques that we are talking that I've mentioned here so I'm going to hand over to Barbara but I'd just like to thank you for your comments there will be a panel discussion after Barbara's talk and maybe some of the issues that have come up can actually be discussed then at that point in time thanks very much for your kind attention