 So, this is being recorded for YouTube and you can find that by just simply googling YouTube and Genetic Genealogy Ireland and that will bring you to our dedicated YouTube channel. Most of the presentations that you have seen this weekend are going to be up there. So that's the majority of the presentations and it's a great resource for everybody who is not able to make it to the conference in Dublin themselves. Now, in terms of identifying World War I soldiers, I'm going to talk about the identification process itself. I'll give you the example of fromel which was when 250 soldiers were found in the mass grave back in 2009. We'll talk about whether the public databases that we are creating as genetic genealogists can actually help the identification process and then I'll say a few words about creating your own memorial using genealogy and genetic genealogy. First off, John Redmond encouraged a lot of Irish people to join up in the war effort in 1914 when World War I broke out. A lot of Irish men joined for the glory of Ireland and there were many Irish heroes who fought in World War I and one of the most famous was Sergeant Michael O'Leary who became part of the general World War I propaganda at the time how he defeated 10 Germans single-handedly as one against the thousands that type of thing. So there was a lot of involvement of Ireland in World War I. A million people died in action, one over a million men, 800 women and 338,000 of those million people who died are still missing from the British and Commonwealth forces and the majority of those will be lying somewhere on the Western Front. Over 200,000 Irishmen fought in the British Army and this is a map that breaks down the more than 35,000 Irish men that were killed during World War I 10% of them at the at the Somme 3,500 at the Somme, 2,000 from the 36th Ulster Division and 1,200 from the 16th Irish Division and this is a breakdown by county of the various known fatalities that happened of Irish men fighting in World War I. So how many soldiers in the British Army do not have a known grave? Well these days are based from March 2009 and they reckon that the those that are buried in named graves amount to over 500,000. No known graves but listed on memorial to the missing another 500,000 and of these about 187,000 are buried in unmarked graves or unidentifiable graves and therefore those that are not buried at all amount to about 338,000. So those men are still lying in the green fields of France and we're finding about 30 bodies per year so if it took a thousand years we might get somewhere near finding all of those men. Here's just a map of the Western Front which stretched from the French Belgium border on the coast of Stend going down through northern France over to northwestern France over to the German border just south of Luxembourg and all the way down to Switzerland and these are for some of the major battles occurred. Here's the river Somme here that's where a large proportion of the World War I casualties took place and there's also a Google map which actually shows you where recovery of servicemen has been found and you can see that it mirrors the Western Front that many of them were found on the Western Front and this is where various people were discovered over various periods of time. So these remains are being discovered all the time somewhere between 30 to 60 soldiers remains are being discovered every year during routine farm work during road widening schemes during excavation for building new buildings. So for example in April 2016 there were 19 bodies recovered two of them were deemed to be German nine were deemed to be nine Commonwealth soldiers only two have been identified so far you can see here that the badge says Royal Warwickshire so they were able to identify the regiment for the Commonwealth soldiers that were found and this is just one example of these annual discoveries that occur as farmers are doing their routine farm work. Now the usual process for managing these recovered remains is to contact the police first of all to find out whether it's a recent death and possibly a murder and if they come out and say no there's nothing recent about this it's probably war dead then the remains are first of all permission is given to recover the remains and that recovery process may be undertaken by the local army or archaeologists or even the person the original finder of the remains if it was part of an archaeological dig for example in Belgium then the police write a detailed report but if the discovery occurs in France where the majority of the finds will be then it's the Commonwealth War Grave Commission's exhumation officer who will take charge of coordinating the recovery and they'll also secure the artifacts and store the remains in especially designed mortuary they have for that purpose. Then perhaps the identity of the nationality can be confirmed and if the nationality can be confirmed then the Commonwealth War Grave Commission reports to the member government ministry defense so in the United Kingdom it's the JCCC in Germany it's the VDK if it is a British and Commonwealth soldier then the JCCC will coordinate everything to identify that particular soldier they'll be looking to identify the nationality the regiments and the individual himself and if that individual is identified then the family will be traced and a funeral will be organized. That sounds like a very simple process but an actual fact it is hugely complicated. The process for identifying the remains is coordinated in the UK by the Ministry of Defense specifically the sub-team the service personnel and veterans agency specifically the sub-sub-team the joint casualty and compassionate care center the sub-sub-sub-team historic casualty and deceased estate casework team and the sub-sub-sub-sub-team which deals with historic casualties and war dead that consists of two people if you're getting the impression that this is quickly becoming an impossible task I think you would probably be heading in the right direction you know if there are 30 bodies discovered every year then two people that's 15 bodies per person 12 months in a year they have less than four weeks to identify each individual that's if they're working at it full-time so you can see that there is a huge amount of work potentially that falls on the shoulders of these two people so what happens when you discover 250 soldiers in a mass grave chaos absolutely chaos the recovery team may involve a forensic archaeologist who employs crime scene investigation like procedures I couldn't include a forensic anthropologist like Rene Gaper who was speaking to us yesterday about the Barrymore project and that forensic anthropologist will look to maybe to find the age the height the battle wounds and he's distinguishing features like a broken arm a broken leg that has healed previously there may also be a military historian involved a photographer a project manager and the aim is to identify nationality regiment and the individual soldier himself here's an example of some of the finds so here we have an entire tank that has been discovered here is some ammunition that has been discovered that might tell you the nationality of the soldier I'm no expert on ammunition but is that a Luger it is okay so that's probably a German soldier that has been discovered the trench tools that they use to dig the trenches can also tell you the identity of the nationality of the soldier and here we have Tony Robinson probably with British French digging tools I'm not sure boots footwear clothing buttons can tell you the regiment that the soldier belongs to and badges and here we have again the Royal Warwickshire badge discovered in April of this year dog tags now dog tags were introduced in August 1914 as a single dog tag so a soldier dies he has his dog tag on the Germans come along and they take the dog tag to give it to the Red Cross so the Red Cross can give it to the family so they know the soldier has died what's left on the soldier nothing the two dog tag system was introduced in September 1916 which was three months after the Battle of Ramelle so it was too late for from El so in from El it was the one dog tag system approach where that was used and they couldn't identify the soldiers by dog tags in from El as a result of that here's an example of some of the artifacts that might be found with the soldier we have up here on the top left maybe an ink bottle here's a spoon here's a helmet here's a tin these are belt buckles I think here and that can be quite I that can identify the nationality of the soldier because they can be quite distinctive here's a pipe here's a brush here's a book maybe so these are the kind of artifacts that might be found with the soldier and the process for identifying these remains is first of all looking for nationality and regiment and for this historical war records that detail the troop movements are very very important and also artifacts found with or near the remains very very important for identifying nationality and regiment sometimes the service number will be on the spoon so Michelle is saying that John Morrison earlier this year Michelle was involved with the identification and the service number was actually on the spoon so that's quite a rare case and I should say that Michelle who will be featuring in this presentation is one of the genealogists that helped identify the soldiers in the mass grave in from L so and she did a very good presentation last year and I have a link to it in the slideshow so you'll be able to take that down if possible the individual has identified is a DNA sample taken well up until about April of this year apparently it was not but now apparently it is according to one of the great war forums one of those discussion groups that you have online but how the DNA is taken what DNA is taken and what analysis they do there's no information there's nothing on the official websites from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission or the JCCC to say just exactly what they are doing what the process is for DNA sampling and what kind of DNA they're actually taking the genealogy and the potential living relatives are then traced working with volunteer genealogists like Michelle and Mel Pax another one and there might be a couple of other genealogists around the UK that do this type of work but I think it's so important to emphasize that this is volunteer genealogists like you and me if the relatives can be contacted then DNA is taken from the relatives compared with the DNA you've got from the soldier and the identity is confirmed that way again it sounds incredibly easy you'll see how difficult it is from from El question at the back we collect why DNA and mitochondrial DNA apparently from what we did it in the from El project and when they say they are collecting DNA I'm assuming it's why DNA as well as mitochondrial DNA I don't know if they're collecting autosomal DNA as well which is all the other chromosomes so like I say we just don't know because there's no information out there war records are a bit of a problem most servicemen swear about can be located given a name a regiment and a date so if you have a relative who was in the British Army they're whereabouts can be located by a name a regiment and a date that's that's pretty good going and the military historian at Q in London is able to do that the servicemen's details exist for Canadian and Australian service files but the British records were burnt during the blitz in Second World War and only about I think it's a 70% of them remain or 70% of them were destroyed so it's about 60 70% of them were destroyed and it means that the servicemen the burnt records of the ones that survive not many so so it's difficult to actually get servicemen's details including age height nationality ethnicity date of birth that kind of thing there have been issues and concerned about the whole process expressed on a lot of these Great War forums World War one forums Facebook that type of thing primarily around insufficient efforts being made historically to identify these found remains the recovery of the remains sometimes the farmers do not report them because there's too much delay it's an inconvenience for their livelihood and it's a loss of income and in many cases the remains are just plowed over are their bulldozed and they're lost to them also the local laws and customs are not clearly stated or understood and if they are understood are they actually observed and enforced there's also major problem with trophy hunters some of whom can be very very aggressive Andy Robert Shaw talks about when he was on an archaeological dig recovering some soldiers a live bullet was taped to his windscreen of his car so there can be incredibly it's certainly in Russia I think there is a huge business in World War one memorabilia also the incentives to report soldiers remains have been tried previously with detrimental effects so for example you would get a bounty if you found a skeleton and reported it so people split the skeleton in two and got two bounties there's a reluctance to publicize the fines by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and other Ministry of Defense's there's a lack of transparency as to the exact process and DNA is not routinely recovered from the remains prior to reburial at least historically is that still true according to one of the forums they're now collecting DNA since April of this year whether that is the case I'm not sure because there's nothing official so onto a prime example of the recovery process and the from El project and there is some information about the from El project online this is the Australian Army website we also have the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website so some of the information in this presentation has been gleaned from these websites there's also a very very very good documentary which features Michelle and you can see it on that particular link there at the bottom called finding the battalions the lost battalions which details the whole recovery process of from El but most of the information that I'll be giving you is from these two books remembering from El which was compiled by Julius Summers and includes accounts from various people that were involved in the project and also remember me to all which was published by Oxford Archaeology which was the archaeological group that was responsible for digging up the mass grave so battler from El took place on the 19th of July 1916 it was a diversionary tactic in conjunction with the battle of the psalm so they wanted to divert German attention away from the psalm onto from El and that maybe gives the advantage to the British troops at at the psalm over 5,000 Australian casualties occurred and it has gone down as the worst day in Australian military history 2,000 of them were killed 1,299 were missing there were 1,547 British casualties of whom about 500 were killed so you're looking at somewhere in the region of 2,500 people being killed during the battle of from El now a word about the numbers the numbers vary because people are not entirely sure just exactly how many people were killed during this time but the dead have been counted so for example at VC Corner Cemetery there's a memorial for 1,294 Australian soldiers who are missing presumed dead it was initially 1,299 but five of them were identified in the 1920s so now it's 1294 and the five names have been cemented so that they're no longer visible on the memorial there are 410 unidentified Australian soldiers buried in VC Corner Cemetery and in nearby cemeteries there's other unidentified Australian soldiers for example 266 in Rue David 142 in ration farm 22 in Rue Petillon 72 in Y farm so totaling it all up there are 1,131 unknown Australian burials in total from the battle of from El and that leaves 163 Australian Australian soldiers still missing and unaccounted for where are they and that was the question that was asked by a retired school teacher Lampus Iglesos and he started investing investigating these unaccounted for missing soldiers and he was joined in 2003 by Peter Barton a very well-known military historian who was also co-secretary of the all-party war graves and battle heritage group in the UK and then in 2006 the records indicated that there were mass graves for 400 dead dug behind pheasant wood near from El and that meant that if there were 163 Australians among the 400 dead there could be up to 240 British among those people in that mass grave and when Peter Barton presented this to the all-party war graves and battle heritage group in the House of Commons that's when the British really became involved in trying to find the missing of from El so in 2007 they located where the mass they thought the mass grave was and they did a geophysical survey which confirmed that there was eight mass graves in that area and the following year they did a limited excavation which confirmed that there were remains present and thereafter in 2009 they did a full-scale excavation of the mass grave and you can mass graves were buried by the Germans mass graves were dug by the Germans so immediately after the battle of from El and you can read about it as an issue 44 of war time but immediately after the battle for hygiene reasons the Germans would have dug these graves and would have put the bodies into the graves they were not dumped in the graves they were actually laid out extremely respectfully there were there were even two brothers put in side by side so this is the site of the mass grave in pheasant wood and the excavation took place between the 5th of May 2009 and the 16th of October 2009 it was a very warm summer and they had to wear these crime scene investigation like suits to avoid contamination the artifacts were logged the chain of custody was established and here's a variety of artifacts that they found in the area so here we have a bible with some of the passages underlined this is a boot which is actually quite unusual because the British boots were much more comfortable than the German boots so if the Germans found a British dead they would take the boots off and swap their boots because it was more comfortable for the for the Germans with the British boots here is a gold cross here is either a pocket watch or a compass with some engraving on the back but not enough engraving to actually give an identification of the person and of course the problem with these artifacts that have engravings on them is that was this the belonging of the actual soldier where it was found or did he say oh Billy's dead I must pick up his watch and tell his family and then he gets shot with Billy's watch so it wasn't possible to use these kind of artifacts for identification purposes here's a cardigan here's a very touching one it's a rosary beads here's a money pouch these are matches everybody smoked in those days these are matches this is a leather case for wire cutters to cut through the barbed wire this is a return ticket to Perth that was never used so altogether 250 remains were exhumed and DNA was collected first of all was collected from the people working on the site to form an elimination database all those people in those white suits that you saw they had their DNA tested to make sure that their DNA did not contaminate what they were excavating the collection was supervised by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission project manager and stored by the scene of crime officer then DNA samples were collected from the bodies of the scene again supervised by the scene of crime officer and transported to the DNA laboratory the forensics laboratory LGC forensics in London and they determined whether viable DNA could be extracted from the samples now the sort of samples that they took back in 2009 was a minimum of one tooth and one bone sample the tooth could be upper canine upper second molar the bones were metacarpals metatarsals those are the metacarpals in the hand metatarsals in the foot fibula is the outside of the leg the long bones like the the the femur and the humerus the radius and the ulna in the forearm a rib and of all else a femur so the femur was the last one because it's just so big and bulky and it had to be transported from France to London they also sometimes use soft tissue including hair Achilles tendon and even brain tissue so pretty gruesome stuff modern sampling in 2016 would dictate perhaps that the preferred area is the Petra's bone the inner ear because you get for up to 400 times the yield of DNA that you would get from these other bones the DNA that they did recover was viable they recovered it in low quantities and in a degraded form but it was sufficiently usable to obtain YSTOR and mitochondrial DNA profiles for all of the buried soldiers how many YSTOR markers were recovered probably 17 because they were using the Wi-Fi or 17 system to amplify the the DNA and extracted how many mitochondrial DNA markers were recovered I don't know because it's not actually reported in any of the sources that I've looked at in order to create a comparative DNA database remember we've got the elimination database for the workers working there to make sure that they're not contaminating then we've got the DNA from the soldiers themselves all 250 soldiers Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA now we need to compare the soldiers DNA to something that's going to help identify them and that's something is the DNA from their relatives from their family now 250 soldiers were recovered but we knew that 1,650 were missing and they had to belong to that list of 1,650 some of them are already buried in unknown graves or on marked graves on identified graves but we knew that the 250 soldiers in the mass grave belonged to a list of 1,650 soldiers so what did we do we needed a DNA sample from the families of the 250 so we had to trace the families of all 1,650 that were on the list of missing soldiers now you can see the enormity of the task and for this to fall on the shoulders of two people in the sub sub sub sub team of the ministry of defense it was a major major undertaking and they did very very well to do as well as they did they um well they did well to to deal with the barrage of information they were getting from the volunteer genealogists like Michelle and Mel Pack in the UK and various other people in Australia who were involved in the identification of the 1,650 genealogies of those soldiers on that list of missing and unaccounted for they wanted preferably informative DNA donors so it had to be on a on a on a Y line so that's father father father father a direct mail line and they also for the mitochondrial DNA they had to it had to be on a mother mother mother line going back towards the soldier or his parents or his grandparents or his great grandparents um and there preferably had to be two Y DNA samples from each family and two mitochondrial DNA samples from each family that meant we needed 6600 DNA donors to identify 250 soldiers an enormous task an absolutely enormous task this is an example of what an informative DNA donor looks like if we assume that this chap from World War I born in 1895 died in 1916 he would have been 20 years old um there's his parents there's his great grandparents and great grandparents if he had brothers who had sons who had sons who were still alive in in 2016 these would be informative Y DNA donors these are people that we could test because their Y DNA would have been inherited from the father of the soldier it would have come down that direct mail line for the mitochondrial DNA if the soldier had sisters they would have received the mitochondrial DNA from their mother passes on to their daughters who would have passed it on to their daughters or sons if any of these were still alive they would be candidates for mitochondrial DNA testing because the mitochondrial DNA has passed down along the direct female line to these relatives and the soldier himself if there were no brothers supposing the soldier had no brothers you go up a generation higher to a brother of his father and trace down that way and if there were no sisters you might have to go up two generations and then trace down look where you have to go back to you have to go back to 1800 in some of these genealogies to actually get informative DNA donors so sometimes it was an easy task sometimes it was an impossible task but the whole idea is to triangulate on this soldier with both Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA and the triangulation is important because we're not just using the Y DNA in isolation or the mitochondrial DNA in isolation we're using them both together to use Bayesian statistical probabilities which i'll show you shortly sorry leave that up for you to take a photograph so tracing the living relatives by was done by the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre in the UK or the unrecovered war casualties army in Australia they tried two methods the first method was publicity they put it in the papers they advertised it there was a petition for family to come forward who knew that they had relatives who fought in fromel that was successful in Australia it was not successful in the UK because fromel was well known in Australia and everybody in the UK had not heard about it there were local media reports on individual soldiers which did bring local families forward and there were road shows shows specifically in the UK that did help identify some of the soldiers families but the main method that was used to get informative DNA donors was the genealogy method and that meant that genealogists like Michelle tracked down soldiers from the list of 1650 the regimental groups and societies were very helpful and cooperative Mel Pack in the UK traced most of the British families along with Michelle and small teams of dedicated volunteer genealogists did most of this legwork and then sent this huge body of data to the two people working in the sub sub sub team of the Ministry of Defense so it was incredible incredible amount of work and it required an incredible amount of cooperation collaboration and communication and a lot of the time it worked and some of the time it worked well this is Michelle's presentation from a genetic genealogy island which was two years ago 2014 and you can see that on YouTube on the genetic genealogy island YouTube channel tracing living relatives was very successful and in most cases no possible genetic identification was achieved in only a very small number of cases either because the family was extinct and had died out or there was no informative relatives that survived there wasn't anybody on the direct male line there wasn't anybody on the direct female line so they couldn't get YDNA or mitochondrial DNA and in only a very very small number of cases the families were unwilling to donate the DNA that happened in three out of 277 families in the UK only YDNA and mitochondrial DNA was collected from these families as far as i can ascertain there was no autosomal DNA connected collected from these families but some of the DNA was actually collected from deceased people in the families from medical slides or biopsies that they'd had at the local hospital so there were extraordinary lengths gone to to achieve the outcome of this project also there was an expected NPE rate of about one to two percent NPE non-paternal event also known as not the parent expected either because of adoption or illegitimacy or infidelity and they were expecting a one to two percent non-paternal event rate they observed a two percent rate so they were bang on with that estimate the actual identification process itself involved a data analysis team headed by Professor Margaret Cox of Oxford Archeology then there was a co-chair in Dr Peter Jones and then they had subject matter experts in anthropology archaeology molecular genetics military history records and statistics as required this data analysis team would review all the data that have been collected not just the DNA data but also the artifactual data and the age and stature and anthropological data and then they would make a judgment on whether or not a particular soldier could be identified beyond reasonable doubt and i'll talk about the identification standards shortly and then they would make a recommendation to the joint identification board so the data analysis team were the experts the joint identification board was associated with the ministry defense of australia and britain and they decided ultimately whether or not to accept the identification recommendation from the data analysis team then if they had were happy that they'd made a positive identification they then contact the commonwealth war grave commission to make sure that the soldier hadn't been buried before because sometimes and it happened in one case some soldier was buried and given an identification based on scant evidence and what they discovered was that in fact that was the wrong soldier that wasn't the soldier that they had buried in that particular grave the soldier that shouldn't be in that grave was the soldier that they just identified as the data by the data analysis team in the joint identification board so the soldier's identification would then be passed to the relevant government minister the family would be notified and the media would be informed that was the identification process the standard that they used for identification was the balance of probabilities for the army whether it was german french british but for an individual identification there had to be clear and convincing evidence that indicates that an identification is substantially more likely than not and in order to achieve that they used a variety of different techniques which i'll talk about now but just a show of hands how often did non-dna evidence lead to identification do you think so we have non-dna evidence like anthropology artifacts we didn't have dog tags but sometimes we had inscribed artifacts did that lead to that non-dna evidence did that lead to identification in roughly 10 percent of people okay one in about 10 people say that about 50 percent of people okay about six or seven people say that 90 percent of people nobody goes for 90 percent the answer is zero percent okay the first data analysis team met in 2010 there was no dna available they had made a tentative identification of only three of the 250 soldiers based on the artifactual evidence so no positive identifications were assigned based on the artifactual evidence the dna was the only thing that allowed definite identification to be made and that is one of the take-home lessons from from l without dna there's no identification we mentioned already only one dog tag was worn by soldiers at from l all personal items and id tags would have been removed by the germans to be given to the red cross so the red cross could then forward it to the families so that the family would actually have the possessions of their loved one so but it meant that there was little evidence left on or near the soldier to actually identify him the dna matching was in two groups so they they uh took the dna from the soldier and then they compared it to the dna they had from all of the families and they tried to match them up and there were two groups group one was where um the dna from the soldier matched a donor family's dna either the y or the mitochondrial or both with a very strong match probability because it was maybe quite rare dna and or it was an exact match that type of thing and the dna profile was not present in the elimination database from the people working on the site and there was no evidence of an non-paternity event adoption illegitimacy infidelity that type of thing so that was group one a strong dna match group two was not a strong dna match even because the dna profile did not match any of the current donor families there was not a match between any of the soldier's dna and any of the families or the dna matched from the soldier matched several of the donor families because it was a very very common type of dna signature and that could have been due to a partial profile where they didn't get maybe the full 17 dna markers maybe they only got about 10 or five uh it was maybe a very common y dna profile or mitochondrial profile or there were contradictory profiles perhaps because there'd been an adoption in the family and there was a mismatch there between the profiles perhaps the dna was only sufficient to identify a haplogroup and they couldn't do much more than that or there might have been a suspected non-paternity event from the family the family might have said we always thought he was adopted you know so that would have caused confusion the strongest match probabilities that were observed in the whole project was for mitochondrial dna won in 1915 in other words for this particular comparison the chances of it happening the probability of it happening just by chance is almost one in 2000 it's pretty good but 2000 is still pretty low on the y dna side the highest probability they have of it occurring just by chance was won in 3387 again using just y dna alone or mitochondrial dna dna alone is not hugely convincing for a positive identification but when you combine the two so for example if you have one in 1950 on the mitochondrial dna side and one in 3387 on the y dna side if you multiply them then you get up to one in 6.4 million now that's a positive identification you know with 99.99999 probability so it's the combination of the y dna and the mitochondrial dna that gave this project its real strength and that didn't happen in all cases because they did not get y and mitochondrial from all of these cases all of these these soldiers and then they employed Bayesian probability statistics to arrive at this overall probability that this was a positive identification and if you're interested in Bayesian probability statistics and i'm sure you could devote a lifetime to trying to understand them there's a very good presentation that was done by John Reed last year at who do you think you are in the UK which looks at the Bayesian probability statistics they used to prove that the skeleton in the car park in Leicester was rigid third and therefore he should be buried in Leicester Cathedral so that's the fancy statistic that they used there sometimes they used haplogroup information sometimes it was quite useful because if you have an unusual haplogroup then that could maybe tell you where that soldier was from so for example some people had Jewish haplogroups genetic signatures that are found primarily in the Jewish population and of course the religion of the soldiers was recorded on their service records so if the service records survived and they knew that a soldier was Jewish and you found a Jewish haplogroup among the DNA signatures of the soldiers you there's only a couple of people that it might be also um aboriginal some aboriginal soldiers were fighting in the Australian ranks Australian battalions and some of these soldiers were noted on their service forms as dark or darky or half cast terms wouldn't use today but they did use them back then also Eastern European names were recorded on the service men's records and they could be matched with Eastern European haplogroups and the same for Scandinavian but these were not reliable they were only used for supporting the identification and not for assigning the identification they were merely a pointer or a clue and that's important another point or a clue was the optimized program that they used which was a statistical program based on nearest neighbor analysis and basically what they did was they measured the height or estimated the height of all the soldiers they estimated the age of all the soldiers and then they put the age on the x-axis that's the y-axis and then the height on the x-axis and they plotted all 250 soldiers that way then they went to the service records and looked at the age and the height of all the people in the service and they were able to maybe identify just based on age and height who was the most likely candidate for a particular set of soldier remains and again the optimized program did not make identification but have offered the potential to speed up the process by using agent stature to link the remains of the buried soldiers with those missing soldiers service records again a pointer or a clue great starting point for your further investigations if you want to see the science behind the story there's a very good youtube video from lgc forensics themselves featuring dr james walker and victoria moore and in the 19th of july 2010 the last burial occurred in pheasant wood cemetery over the course of the subsequent six years more soldiers each year have been identified and those gravestones have been changed to have their name inscribed on them currently as of september 2016 thanks to michelle 150 out of the 250 soldiers have been identified 100 remain unidentified some of them are some of those who have been identified are irish howl's john berth lieutenant robert david burns private william thomas connelly private william cullen private patrick william fahey private persie heathen although i suspect it's leason private leslie william heart private william alexander jamison private william moore corporal charles william murray acting sergeant william polding ryan private daniel berger these are people with obvious irish ancestry who were fighting in the australian forces who have been identified but the search is still going on for some of the irish soldiers that died of fromel search launched for a family of donigal soldier the soldier um which the project is trying to match with his donigal relatives is believed to be joseph curran born in 1885 killed in action july the 19th first day of the battle his grandparents migrated to new south wales from crossroads in donigal their names were michael curran and dan dugham and both were born about 1837 in crossroads perfect project for a local genealogist in donigal and and that's what we need you know as a community of genealogists we can be doing a huge amount of work to try and find these people here's another one from 2010 search for relative of irish lost soldier william cadena of a company the royal dublin fusiliers fell during the battle of fromel remains are believed to be those among the 250 35-year-old private cadena's regimental number was 23042 he's married married cadena they lived at five tyron place golden bridge inch core in dublin he was one of 4777 dublin fusiliers killed on various fronts during the first world war they can be contacted at commonwealthorganiccommission.org so again trying to find his relatives here's another one from last month september 17 2016 margio leary is starting a go fund me campaign to pay for a professional genealogist in ireland to trace the remains of peter paul shannon or the relatives of peter paul shannon in northern france um they have exhausted our abuser researcher of the past two years born in ireland and came to australia in the 1890s he was born in 1883 at new ross in wexford um and he joined the australian army in 1915 in peter's case none of his siblings had children so he must look for dna commencing in ireland the formal association of australia not-for-profit organization entirely run by volunteers volunteers volunteers you'll hear me repeating quite frequently how important it is that volunteers are doing this work it's not professionals it's volunteers or it could be professional genealogists volunteering their time but peter is listed on the ancestry tree promel soldiers so if you want to see if any of your relatives are on the promel soldiers list go to that ancestry tree and if you think you can see someone there and they need some help expanding that tree please do give it so lessons from promel no dna no identification no genealogists no families to test which kind of begs the question are we adequately harnessing the power of our genealogy community to assist in identification there were 1,650 families requiring 6,600 donors to identify 250 soldiers haplogroup data and optimized data where pointers are clues and the identification process is ongoing but how is it ongoing because the they were only given a five-year remit so now it's gone back to the ministry defenses of the company countries involved and we're not entirely sure how that is going on one of the things that struck me from reading the books on promel was this paragraph here in order to establish a familial link it's essential to locate living genetic relatives from if possible both their maternal and paternal lines without living relatives it is extremely difficult to match the dna of a buried soldier to that of the family of a missing soldier as the buried soldier's dna profile without an external reference is simply an anonymous signature but now there is an external reference and you guys are the ones that created it because we have public why dna databases and these could be pointers or clues that can predict the surname of males we have why search we have family tree dna possibly the national dna database i don't know because i don't know enough about it in the uk it might be just autosomal dna but also now we have the technological advance of sampling the petro's bone with 400 times greater dna yield and the number of markers that are approved for this type of work in forensic labs as far as i understand it as increased from wi-fi 17 to wi-fi 23 and we might be getting 37 at some point of time or as a professor dan bradley was suggesting yesterday get a dna sample and do next generation sequencing on it do a big why test get those snips and then compare it with the the snips from the family's relatives so this the public databases can be a pointer or a clue and i'll show you why here's why search look how many records are in there 177 000 and 110 unique surnames family tree dna it has over 579 000 records in the database with over 400 000 unique surnames so three three point three times the number of records that are in why search here's how you use rub why search click on search for genetic matches click here to enter any sequence anonymously privately without breaching the confidentiality of the soldier who has been and his dna that's been found on the ground enter it in here into any one of these 100 marker fields and there are drop-down menus for each of the possible values that you can input i put in the first 19 markets from gleason lineage one in my gleason dna project and what i found was there were nine matches there is one there this last name is gleason you see you cannot identify any of the individuals so the privacy and confidentiality and anonymity is still preserved unknown origin unknown half the group tested with family tree dna markers compared 19 genetic distance zero so an exact match an exact match there were nine gleason matches in the first 1000 okay but not all of them were exact matches so that only gives a signal of if you like 0.9 it's not very strong but if you look just at the exact matches gleason appears in three of the 13 exact matches that gives you a single of 23 percent so this particular case gleason would be a prime candidate for the surname of the unidentified soldier do the same thing with 12 markers i enter 12 markers into this database and look what i got wheat and wheat and not only wheat and wheat and holder four out of the six exact matches were wheat in this particular case based on only 12 marker data the prime candidate for this soldier is wheat and then what they do is they go to the regimental list they see if there's a wheat in there and there is so then they go and trace that wheat and family target that family rather than all the families in the regiment and then get them tested and compare it to the soldier's dna now you can do the same with a family tree dna massie simons massie simons massie simons of 25 massie simons simons of 37 massier simons look at the regimental list is there a simons or a massie in that regiment here's one uh denman denman denman denman denman well that's a no-brainer really um 37 matches there's a variety of names there i had to go up to 67 to get two gleason's on my blockum and go up to 111 to get a little in the gleason gleason's most likely candidate but i've had to increase the marker level to 111 so it doesn't work in all cases at low marker levels how often does a y dna test predicts the serenade around about 10 to 15 percent based on um data that i collected in 2014 at who do you think you are in london 25 percent of men who do a y dna 37 tests have no matches 50 percent of 1 to 10 matches 25 percent have about more than 10 matches and about 10 to 15 percent of these 130 that i looked at had a clear signal of their own surname in the results and that is likely to increase in time as more and more people test so future considerations an unknown soldier is found the regiment has identified all families of regiments missing soldiers are traced and the dna is tested very very costly instead what you can do is narrow down by an assessment for certain candidates check the serenade candidate against the regimental list identify potential candidate soldiers and target the tracing and testing of that particular soldier's relatives hugely reduced costs and that is what will sell the project to the government so i need to get them to listen uh likelihood of being found 30 bodies are recovered out of 338 thousand that are known to be missing the chances of your relative being found is approximately one in 100 000 per year remote the likelihood of being identified if we take a conservative estimate of about 10 percent using the dna is one in a million per year one in 100 000 per 10 years one in 10 000 over the next 100 years if there's still viable dna to test at that stage so it's remote but even one identification means something to somebody uh what can you do to commemorate create a gene logical memorial digital dna memorial or strengthen the online databases document your own genealogy of your fallen relative put it up online with a paper trail for later independent verification identify potential living descendants for dna testing and leave a digital dna memorial if you already have done a dna test including a link to his genealogy the dna data is available and include your contacts details and you can do that either on lives of the first world war website or every man remembered website and here's one that i left for um my second cousin twice removed michael spiram who died in france we know where he's buried but i leave it as an example michael spiram was my second cousin twice removed with about 10 children his family tree is online at ancestry and there's the link and that's where he's buried and various relatives of michael spiram have undergone dna testing michael's dna is shared by the following people y dna hit number eight q h y d on y search 209 715 on family tree dna his second cousin twice once removed mitochondrial dna no one tested but cousins are available orders on the dna here's 221175 on family tree dna his potential is paternal first cousin so that's the kind of digital dna memorial that you can leave to encourage people to actually start leaving dna profiles for their fallen relatives um you can strengthen the online databases by uploading your y dna to y search uploading your mitochondrial dna to mito search uploading your autosomal dna to get that and then putting the kit numbers on your digital dna memorial i have a world war one missing action dna legacy project on family tree dna you're more than welcome to join should you so wish and it's really just to leave there's just a memorial really um using because we are genetic genealogists but the whole purpose of this process is to try and turn this type of gravestone a soldier known onto god into this type of gravestone which actually has the soldier's name and giving soldiers the dignity of having identification in death so thank you very much i can see people queuing up outside so um we probably don't have any time for questions because it is now 10 past four so if you want to talk to me afterwards i will be uh around downstairs or tomorrow morning before the lectures so thanks very much for your time yeah sure sure my interest in this is how a great uncle who died and simply wants to about to leave our research this whole war history and everything about me is