 Okay, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the next speaker who is Debbie Kent. Debbie is honorary clinical research associate, honorary research associate at a university college London. She's the author of the very popular genetic genealogy blog, Cruise Use, and she's an author as well, having authored DNA and social networking and also the surname Handbook. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Debbie. She's going to talk to us about a really fascinating topic, and that is the mysteries that the Titanic solved by DNA. So this should be a really, really interesting and very appropriate presentation for where we are today. So please give a warm welcome for Debbie Kent. Thank you. Can you hear me? Oh, I must be on the mute. And it's over here. Sorry. There we go. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. Well, it's been an interesting experience compiling this talk and I've actually found it quite emotional because I think part of family history research is exploring the lives of the individuals and somehow when you look at disasters in the abstract, it doesn't mean very much. But once you get down to the individual people, it suddenly has much more meaning. I'm going to be looking today at two different cases where DNA testing was used. In the first case, we're trying to identify some of the bodies. And in the second case, where someone came forward later on who claimed to be descended from someone who was on the Titanic. Now, the Titanic itself obviously needs no introduction. It was the largest and most opulent steamliner when it was first launched. And it was actually launched from the docks here 107 years ago. I went out yesterday walking around the docks trying to imagine the scene. There were 100,000 people who turned out for the launch of this boat. So the docks out there must have been packed with people all really excited at this marvellous feat of engineering. Harlan and Wolfe were the largest and most productive shipyard in the world. And it was the pride of Belfast. So after the launch, it went off to be fitted out with all the fancy chandeliers and all the lavish interiors. And it had them as tested for seaworthiness. And on the 10th of April, it set sail from Southampton on its maiden voyage to New York, stopping on the way in France and also in Ireland. And as everyone knows, four days into the voyage, it hit the iceberg and it sank with a colossal loss of life. Now, one thing I found, it's actually very difficult to find exact figures of the number of people who were on the Titanic and how many lost their lives. So the figures I put up here are estimates. They may be slightly higher. They may be slightly less. The ship itself wasn't completely booked out. It had capacity for many more people, but there were roughly 2,344 people on the ship. Then you have the first-class passengers with all the high society people paying $80,000 for their trip across the Atlantic. But the bulk of the passengers were the third-class passengers who were the emigrants setting off for a new life in the new world. And it was the most fantastic ship. The photo there is actually a model that's in the Titanic Hotel. And it just gives you an idea of the size and sort of sheer scale of the ship. There were 908 crew members. The numbers don't add up to 2,344 because there are also some additional people who were from Harland and Wolfe who were there for the main voyage. There were 3,500 life jackets on the boat, more than enough for every person on the ship. But as you probably know, there were only 20 lifeboats. So the lifeboats only had capacity for less than half of the people on the ship. And remarkably, the lifeboat capacity actually met the Board of Trade requirements. When the boat was launched, they decided they didn't want to have quite as many... They actually had capacity for 64 lifeboats. They decided they didn't want to have so many because it upset the design of the decks of the ship. So they didn't have as many lifeboats on board as they could have done. There were roughly 1,517 Titanic victims. It may be more, it may be less than that. We really don't know the exact number. And although 63% of the passengers lost their lives, but there are stark differences depending on where you were in the ship. 9% of the first class passengers lost their lives. 58% in standard class and 76% of those in third class. And the crew also, 76% of them lost their lives. If you were a female, you had a much better chance of surviving than a male. So if many more females survived the Titanic than the males. It's hard to imagine that the sight of the ship going down, it took three hours to sink. And this is a quote, a famous quote from one of the survivors. The sounds of people drowning are something that I cannot describe to you. And neither can anyone else. It's the most dreadful sound. And there is a terrible silence that follows it. If you have an ancestor who was on the Titanic or a relative, there are now passenger lists available online. A lot of the records are actually held in London at the National Archives. So they've got the Harland and Wolfe records. They've got a memorial website that was set up for the 100th anniversary. So you can search the passenger and crew list for free. And they've also got some nice little stories about some of the people who were on the ship. And you can now also see some of the original records on Find My Pass. So they have the passenger list and the registers of deceased passengers and the registers of the deceased seaman. And one of the people on board the ship, I don't know how many of you watch Call the Midwife, but Stephen McGahn, the actor who plays Dr. Turner in that, he has an ancestor who was on the Titanic. And there's a very nice little video on YouTube where he is actually, for the first time, able to look at the original record of his ancestor, Titanic McGahn, who actually survived the Titanic. And he's written a little book called Flesh and Blood where he's got stories about his ancestors and he's got the story of his Titanic ancestor in that book. Now after the ship sank, the grim task of trying to retrieve the bodies began. And a number of boats were sent out to try and salvage the bodies. There were life jackets for everyone on board and a lot of the bodies were actually found in the sea in the life jackets just floating in the water. The water temperature was minus four degrees. The air temperature was minus two. And in that sort of temperature, no one has a chance more than after about five, ten minutes. But only 334 bodies of the over 1,500 Titanic victims were actually found. And because of the number of bodies, they actually ran out of the embalming materials so some of the people were buried at sea. And those same class divisions still persisted. If you were a first class passenger, you were actually buried in a, you had a wooden coffin and it was mainly the third class passengers who were buried at sea, three at a time, and then buried overboard. 59 were claimed by relatives and taken home for burials in their home communities. And there were 150 victims buried in three cemeteries in Halifax, in Nova Scotia, in Canada, which was the nearest major port to the point where the ship came down. So Fairview Lawn, Mount Olivet and Baron de Hirsch. But the vast majority of the victims were buried at one particular location, Fairview Lawn Cemetery. 121 of those 150 victims were buried there. And of those victims, 42 have not been identified. One of the most famous gravestones in the cemeteries, what is known as the grave of the unknown child, erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the disaster of the Titanic, April the 5th, 1912. And this grave has actually become symbolic, not just of a single child, but of all the children who lost their lives in the Titanic disaster. And when the bodies were being collected, the officials began to take records to try and identify them. This is actually the record for what they labeled body number four. And that was the only information that people had to go on to try and work out the child's identity. And you can imagine probably a lot of the children wearing very similar clothes at the time. A lot of children would have had fair hair, an estimated age of two. Now, initially, it was thought that this unknown child was a Swedish boy known as Gustav Palsen. You have to excuse my pronunciation of Swedish. I'm not a Swedish language expert. And there were eyewitness accounts of him being washed overboard. But there was also the fact that his mother was recovered and she was buried in a grave behind the unknown child. And she had the tickets for all four of the children in her pocket. But he was the right age. He had the right hair colour. On the coroner's notes, they'd even written baby Palsen. So this was a case where DNA could possibly provide some answers. And for this type of investigation, the type of DNA that certainly at the time that this study was done is what's called mitochondrial DNA. Now, in each cell in our body, we have this structure in the middle is the nucleus. That's where all the chromosomes are. But you can see the little red globules around the edge. And those are the mitochondria. And there are hundreds or sometimes thousands of mitochondria in each cell, whereas there's only one of each chromosome. So if you're going to get any DNA, you have a much greater chance of getting some mitochondrial DNA than any other type of DNA. A mitochondrial DNA is a circular structure like this. And in the very early days of DNA testing, the only bit of the mitochondrial DNA that was normally sequenced was this bit at the top, that blue bit called the control region or the hypervariable region. These days, with more advanced tests, we can actually sequence the whole mitochondrial genome. There are... And the early tests would only actually, in fact, sequence just a half of that HVR region or control region. And then the more advanced tests came along that would look at both sections of that. But those two sections only cover 10% of the whole mitochondrial genome. And the rest of the genome is actually what's called the coding region, and there are 37 genes in there. And that's the part of the mitochondrial genome where the mutations occur at a much slower rate. Now, the other important thing about mitochondrial DNA is the path of inheritance. So both males and females receive mitochondrial DNA from their mother, but it's only the females who pass it on to the next generation. So that means that you're following this very one specific or female line. Now, if you want to exhume a body, then you are not going to get permission to do so unless you have a reference sample available. So in this particular case, the researchers had to get a reference sample from the relatives in Sweden so that when the body was exhumed, if they were able to extract DNA, they would have something to compare it with to give a yes-no answer as to whether that was his body. So the Titanic Ancient DNA project began in the summer of 1998. This is actually very early on in terms of DNA technology. And it was led by two people, an anthropologist by the name of Ryan Parr and a historian who had a great interest in the Titanic by the name of Alan Ruffman. And they began their project by getting permission to exhume, in fact, three graves from Fairview Lawn Cemetery on behalf of three different families. So the grave number four was the one that was thought to be that of Gustav Poulsen, and they managed to identify some relatives in Sweden to use as comparisons. They also wanted to exhume grave number 240, and this grave was thought to belong to somebody called Charles Joseph Shawney, who was a third-class passenger who'd set off to New York. Now, they were not able to find any matrilineal relatives, but the relatives themselves agreed to let the researchers exhume the grave of Charles's father, who was buried in Sussex, back in England, and they removed a femur, and they did DNA testing on that. And the third grave that they exhumed was thought to be that of Catherine Jane Wallace, who was a matron looking after the emigrants who were on the Titanic, and her granddaughter was available for testing, and it was actually Joan Allison, the granddaughter who was one of the people who was pushing for DNA testing to be done, because she really wanted to know what had happened to her grandmother. And these are the descriptions that we have for the presumed body of Charles Shawney. He was called his age, his hair was possibly dark, and one of the... The body had a watch which had a sign on it to say that it was from Brighton in England, and it was that watch that led the researchers to believe it might be Charles Shawney. And the grave number 281, the belief to be Catherine Wallace, again, we had a few details from the clothing she was wearing, but a distinctive wart on her index finger. So the exhumations began on the 17th of May, 2001, and went on for two days. And the first two bodies to be exhumed were the two adult bodies. But sadly, the graves were completely waterlogged. And this is a quote from Ryan Parr, the researcher, no biological material could be found in the two graves of bodies number 240 and 281. So in plain English, that means that the bodies had completely disintegrated. There was nothing left at all. The only evidence of any burial was some wood from the coffin and the stems of a few flowers. So in both of those cases, DNA was not able to provide an answer. They did go on to do another investigation with Charles Shawney because for some of the corpses, they'd taken photographs. And they were able to do a comparison between a photograph of Charles Shawney and a photograph of the corpse. When the relatives looked at the photographs, they all thought, oh, yes, that looks very much like him. But when they called an independent expert to look at them, he looked at particular features like the eyebrows and also the ears. And apparently the way the ears attached to the face, that's very distinctive. And he concluded that just from the photos, the body was not that of Charles Shawney. So neither the Shawneys nor Joan Allison were able to get closure from any of these investigations and the fate of their relatives is not known. But it was a different case from body number four, in grave number four, the unknown child. And in this case, fortunately, the grave was actually on much higher ground. So it was above the water table, but there was still very little left of the body. There was just a small piece of bone and three baby teeth. But that was enough to get some DNA. And in spring 2002, they did the DNA testing and they got the DNA from the bone, but they only sequenced a very small part of that hypervariable region, that control region part of the mitochondrial genome. And immediately they determined there was no match with the maternal relatives of Gustav Poulsen in Sweden, who was thought to be the child in the grave. So then they also did an analysis of the teeth to get some further evidence. And the first analysis suggested it was probably a child under one year and then some other experts concluded it was probably a child between about nine and 13 months old. And now the search began to look to see which other children were on board the ship and to try and find matrilineal relatives who could take a test as a comparison. So from all the passenger records, they were able to identify six candidate males under three who were lost on the Titanic. And they began to do DNA testing on the relatives of all of them. And you can imagine it's a major genealogical task to identify all these relatives and then trying to identify on that maternal line is particularly troublesome because of the change of surname in most cultures, not so much in Sweden or in Finland. And Gustav Poulsen was already been ruled out through DNA testing. They then test and Gilbert Danbone, the youngest baby on the ship, he was also ruled out through DNA testing, as well as Alfred Peacock. The last person on the list, Eugene Rice, at this point his DNA hadn't been tested but he was ruled out on the grounds that he was too old to be the candidate because of the dental evidence. So that left them with two candidates and with the mitochondrial DNA testing with just that limited amount of evidence, they both had identical mitochondrial signatures. But because of the dental evidence, they decided that it couldn't possibly be Sydney Goodwin, all the people who'd examined the teeth are saying, oh no, it has to be a very, very young child. So it was concluded, he was ruled out and it was concluded that the body must be that of Ino Panula. So the family all came over for a ceremony. And an announcement, they sent out a press release that this unknown child was Ino Panula from Finland and it was in northern newspapers at the time. And there was also a big programme that was on Channel 4, it was also on Canadian television, which told the whole story of the DNA research and that video is actually on YouTube and it's worth watching because they've got interviews with the relatives and it also shows things like the photographic evidence and doing the comparison between the Charles Shawnee and the photograph from the corpse. And the dental results were published in a Canadian dental journal and with all the details of the analysis and how they'd done the dating, a very technical paper but it also included some details about the mitochondrial DNA analysis. So it seemed like it was all hunky-dory, the case closed. But some further evidence came along and the researchers were aware of the existence of these shoes while they were doing the documentary and while they were doing their mitochondrial DNA testing but these shoes had not been authenticated at the time. But a policeman who had, the grandson of a policeman had approached the museum, at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic saying that he'd got this pair of shoes and they belonged to his grandfather and his grandfather had been a policeman who'd had the duty of caring for the bodies and the clothing of the deceased people and all the clothing had to be burned because they didn't want to have ghoulish souvenir hunters coming along and grabbing bits of clothing and taking it away as a souvenir. So he saw this pair of shoes and they were just so poignant that he just couldn't bear to throw them away. So he put them in his desk drawer, five years later he retired and he must have taken them home with his belongings but his grandson decided that they really ought to be in the museum and the museum was eventually able to authenticate them and date them to between about 1900 and 1925. They worked out that they were probably from England but the crucial factor was that the shoes just seemed to be too big for a 13-month-old child and the researchers would begin to have doubts and one thing that they hadn't done normally with mitochondrial DNA testing with any type of ancient DNA research you have to test all the other people who were involved in the project but Ryan Parr, the anthropologist, hadn't been tested and when he had his DNA done he was also a match with the Titanic baby and the Canula sample and the Goodwin sample. So they were really starting to have doubts and to give them... this was the very early days of mitochondrial DNA testing there weren't many samples around so people really didn't know about the frequencies of all these different signatures but as research progressed it became very apparent that certain mitochondrial DNA signatures are very prevalent in the population so this is haplogroup H which if you've taken a mitochondrial DNA test you may come across which is the most common branch of the mitochondrial DNA tree 40% of Europeans belong to this branch so it was then decided that they really needed to do a reanalysis of the mitochondrial DNA evidence at a much higher resolution so they went back and they looked at the... they tested all the six samples again and they did it... they didn't do the full mitochondrial genome sequence that technology still wasn't available but they tested both HBR regions and they also tested some markers from the coding region and they chose a particular section of that where they identified there's more chance of finding some informative mutations and for those of you've taken a mitochondrial DNA test you'll know that even with a full mitochondrial sequence now when you're trying to identify a common ancestor even if you have an exact match on all the markers the common ancestor could still have lived a thousand or more years ago and if we just do an HVR1 test which is what these researchers did in the early years they won't even give you the 90% confidence interval 50% of the time they say the common ancestor will be about 1,300 years ago now for forensic purposes they're not interested in working out who the relative is all they're trying to do is determine between six candidates as to which one is the person whose body is buried in the grave so it's not necessary to have quite the same amount of detail so it took them a while to do all the DNA testing and then they did what they perhaps should have done in the first place they published the results in a scientific journal in a peer-reviewed journal where they got all the technical details about the study and they were able to again eliminate the four of the boys the same four boys that had been eliminated before and these are the results from the unknown child and the Goodwin and the Panula reference profiles so in this case you can see that the Goodwin child has an exact match with the unknown child they both share that particular 9923T mutation there and the Panula sample that has a unique mutation there at position 146 what this is showing is differences from what's known as the Cambridge reference sequence they don't publish the whole sequence they just give you the differences so now we have pretty well it looks very good evidence that the body is likely to be that of Sydney Goodwin and not of I know Panula and it's the haplogroup H1U and 9923T is actually one of the defining mutations for that particular haplogroup unfortunately they were not able to get any Y chromosome DNA they only tried to get YSTR results which is the normal markers that you use when you're doing your DNA matching and in the paper it gives details about the frequency of this 9923T mutation it's found in only three out of 6,000 occurrences in a big database known as GenBank and when they looked at the number of sequences that had been published there were 92 that matched the just the HVR1 profile but only one of those actually shared that same mutation so it was actually very very rare and Ian Logan some of you may know is a mitochondrial DNA expert and he's got a very nice mitochondrial DNA website and he's also looked at the results and he maintains a list of all the known sequences that are H1U and there are only 36 now GenBank now has 40,000 mitochondrial DNA samples and there are only 36 that have this rare mutation although intriguingly there are 200 people in GEDMATCH who say they're in this HVR1U so some of them could possibly be related to the Titanic baby and they then did a statistical analysis of the results using something called a Bayesian analysis which I know John Reid in the audience was very familiar with where first of all you look at the prior probability of being related and here it was a one in six chance because there were just six children to choose from so you start off with a prior probability of 16.67% and then they worked out something called a likelihood ratio I'm not going to go into all of that I'm sure John can give a very good lecture telling us how that works but they worked out that the probability that the body was that of Sydney Goodman was 98.81% and to sum up in more plain English from their paper the consistent profiles and especially the rare coding region polymorphism which is a long name for a mutation shared with the Goodwin maternal references indicate that the unknown child remains are most likely those of Sydney Leslie Goodwin but notice they don't say proof they don't give any certainty 98.81% they didn't make a big fuss about this paper they didn't go and issue a press release they made the identification several years earlier so this later research has actually received a lot less publicity than the original somewhat premature press release and one further mystery that has been I just wanted to discuss briefly which is sometimes known as the last mystery of the Titanic and this involves somebody who came forward later on claiming to be a lady called Lorraine Allison now Lorraine was thought to have died with her parents Hudson and Bess Allison on the Titanic their son Trevor survived but died at the age of 18 of food poisoning Hudson Allison was a Canadian entrepreneur he traveled with a retinue of servants in first class and clearly had a lot of money and then in 1940 a lady who went by various names who called herself Helen Cramer sometimes Helen Lorraine Cramer she came forward and made a public appeal on the radio claiming to be Lorraine Allison and the story that she told was that her father had told her just before she died that he wasn't her father and that he was actually Thomas Andrews who was one of the architects of the Titanic but he was thought to have died when the ship went down and she came up with this story that Hudson Allison had handed over Lorraine Allison to Thomas Andrews and he brought her up as his child the whole story didn't really ring true and most of the family didn't believe it but some did actually take her seriously but it was really upsetting for the family they had a long running dispute with her and they accused her of harassment and all sorts of things and it was thought that in 1992 when she died that was going to be the end of it but it wasn't to be in 2012 a lady called Debraina Woods who was Cramer's granddaughter came forward on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and resurrected the case and restated all the claims she said that she had a suitcase for the documents proving that her grandmother was Lorraine Allison she got a book that she was going to write movie deals signed up she claimed to have had DNA results but never managed to produce them so it was decided to try and use DNA independently of Debraina Woods to try and find an answer and a forensic scientist set up the Lorraine Allison identification project and there's a dedicated website where you can read all about this project in more detail and now Debraina Woods somewhat suspiciously decided she didn't want her DNA tested as part of the project but her half sister Deanne Jennings did agree to test and they tested Sally Kirkley who would have been the great niece of Bess Allison now if the hypothesis was correct that Helen Cramer was Lorraine Allison we would expect the mitochondrial DNA results to match but the results came back and there was no match at all so the story was publicised in the newspapers Debraina Woods still didn't accept the story she said she had more evidence but nothing else has ever been produced to refute those original findings and I just to finish I want to go back to the grave of Sydney of the unknown child which we now know is Sydney Goodwin the family had a memorial ceremony there back in 2008 when the results of the DNA testing came through but they decided because it was such an iconic grave and it was so symbolic not just of their relative but of all the other children 53 other children lost their lives in this disaster and this gravestone represented all of them so they couldn't bear to remove it or erect a new gravestone so what they did was they just put a very very simple little foot stone at the bottom of the grave with his birth date, his death date and that's both the gravestone number and the body number so there's some interesting lessons from this DNA testing is a very useful tool when you can actually get the DNA evidence but it's not always the answer you do need the genealogical records with the DNA evidence and we've seen here in two of the cases there was no chance of getting any DNA at all so I think just like everyone to think for a minute of the 1,500 people who were on board this ship and the vast majority of those bodies were not recovered there is no DNA evidence and for those people there will never be any answer at all Presentation, thank you very much Does anybody here in the room have relatives or ancestors who are actually on the Titanic? We have one, two people Do you know a lot about your ancestor? I'll come over with the microphone and just give it to you So I did some research and he was an engineer sadly he went down with the Titanic but it caused my search deeply into the family and there was an election So I'm quite shocked So I started the photo on the stairway and this DNA is brilliant But is he one whose body wasn't recovered? Is he one? Yeah so the body wasn't recovered so there's no chance of using any DNA testing on him I think one of the lessons to be learned from this obviously they didn't know about DNA testing at the time but the more people we have with their DNA tested when there is a future disaster we will have this ready made we will have ready made reference samples as comparisons It's great that you've actually had your DNA tested What exactly is your relationship to? Do you know the actual connection? Do you know if it's on a mother, mother, mother line up and mother, mother, mother line down because that would be the mitochondrial DNA route Does that have a mother, father, mother? If it varies between mother and father then you've broken the path One of the things that we're trying to do with World War I soldiers in fact is try to identify people who might be DNA donors that might be informative in identifying some of the remains of the World War I soldiers they recover every year they have 30 or 60 remains being found and they identify them through a mother, mother, mother line going up and then mother, mother going down to the soldier and the same on the Y DNA side father, father, father going up and then son, son, son coming down to the soldier and that way they can use both types of information to hopefully identify the unidentified remains So it's still useful as a legacy to your relative to actually have your own DNA tested Well, next talk will be Michelle Lennon she'll be telling you all about that and you had a relative on the It was relatively necessary it was only this week that we got a photo of that the mother and 8 year old was subtle the day we were shooting the mother looks extremely distracted the 8 year old looks straight at the camera across the laps we've got the white star we're at the same time on the Carpathian relative who was awarded the Carpathian and he was a waiter but he subsequently married the waitress from the Carpathian he survived, he helped out the Titanic he got sunk he was on the tip of Lusitania having to be rescued from that and subsequently he got paid for it so it was not to be supported one of the chances that you're on two ships going down that's an incredible story Did anybody else have any connections with the Titanic? No? Those are two wonders Have you had your DNA done or? Yes You had as well? Yeah Do you know if there are any descendants of... I don't know Yes cousins they stopped deciding for themselves I mean they did help Titanic but they also went it was a big exhibition going to the arena seven years ago the best fashion environment I'll just take it Great Any questions at all for Debbie? We have a question over here from John Reed Here we go John Great presentation This last test was done in 2008 and I think that's right Well they seem to have done the testing over a series of years going right up to the publication of the paper so even after they published the... they got the documentary they were still doing testing after that and then they went back and did the testing again at Brigham Young University Scott Woodward did some of the testing there which even at that time the ancient DNA recommendations were to test at two separate labs so they didn't follow the proper ancient DNA protocols at the time but I think it probably would have been about... it probably would have been about I think 2009 it does actually give the details in the paper I can't remember the exact date You're getting into my question because DNA testing has come a long way since then What would you think we would do today? Well today we would have... we would have used next generation sequencing and we would probably have got a whole... we would have got a whole... well not necessarily a whole genome but certainly a pretty good genome out of it as was the case with Cheddar Man and that's a very similar example where when the testing was originally done in 1997 they were only able to test HVR-1 and now with all the latest technology they were able to get a really good whole genome sequence and not just the mitochondria or DNA but the Y DNA and the whole genome as well but whether... I don't know whether this could be revisited because when I looked into this they did actually... one of the teeth was actually destroyed in the process of extracting the DNA and I'm not sure that there was much of the bone left either but I decided to re-burry the teeth and the bone in the grave so if it was going to be tested again you'd have to exhume the body all over again and there's not really any justification that you can make for doing that other than curiosity which is... genealogists is something we all want to see and in fact I was at an ancient DNA conference last weekend and one of the scientists was saying about the frustrations of always having to come up with a research question and he was saying let's just sequence the bejesus out of everyone all our ancient DNA samples which I really sympathised with but we can't just start going round and getting the DNA from every single gravestone in Ireland and England and Wales and Scotland as much as we'd like to What do you think about the chances of any of the other victims of the Titanic being identified? Well I think one of the problems is going to be the preservation because of the location of the graveyard and it was only because the Titanic baby was in a higher location looking around and all the others I would imagine that most of the other gravestones were similarly waterlogged and there probably isn't any DNA left but I was thinking about that and even if they did want to do that it would be a marathon job because they still got to find the reference samples and they've got very little to go on and if you've just got lots of men and women with just very bare descriptions of what they looked like it's a marathon task and in the actual paper there was a huge long list of acknowledgments of all the people involved in the genealogical research just for six children but when you've got all the adults as well the research would be phenomenal to do It reminds me of the Fromel project and what they did in that situation they found 250 soldiers buried in a mass grave they looked at the height of the soldiers and tried to match it against the height of the remains that they found and you could do something similar with the Titanic because you'd have a passenger list and you also of course have all the details of the bodies that were recovered but of course you're only dealing with 334 bodies that were recovered you'd actually have to trace the family trees of all 1,500 people who were on the Titanic in order to identify potentially it's not going to be 334 it would be how many people were buried? 150 old so to identify 150 you would have to do the identity family trees for 1,500 people then get informative DNA donors for all 1,500 and usually you need two on the Y DNA side father, father, father two on the mother side mother, mother, mother so that gives you four per person four multiplied by 1,500 that's 6,000 so you would potentially need to test 6,000 people to identify 59 yeah that's right I don't think it's something that would ever be contemplated the Australian government invested 20 million in the Fromel project to do exactly that that's right any other questions for Debbie? well it just reminded me to say thank you very very much for a very entertaining presentation thank you very much now the next presentation that will be here will be Michelle Leonard who will be talking about autosomal DNA like family finder tests and how to maximise its use in your family tree and that will do it about 10 minutes that was a bit shorter than I anticipated actually stop the recording