 Alright ladies and gentlemen, we can all take our seats, that would be great. We're in for a real treat now because we have, we have with us Michelle Leonard and Michelle will be talking to us about the from El's genealogy project from a World War One mass grave to 21st century named grave. This is an incredible and a wonderful story about how dealing has actually restored the identities of some of the soldiers who fell on the western front and have lain there for almost 100 years. Now Michelle comes to us from the University of Strathclyde, she has an MA in modern history in English from the University of St Andrews, a PG cert in genealogical paleographic and heraldic studies from the University of Strathclyde, she's a member of the Society of Genealogists. I've heard her talk already and I know you're in for a treat, so please give a warm welcome to Michelle Leonard. Hi everyone, can you hear me okay? You can, I've put the mute button off and you'll be activated. Thank you, that's better, yes everyone can hear me now. Okay, so I'm going to do a presentation that's maybe a little bit different in terms of genetic genealogy, my presentation's not going to be terribly DNA heavy but I'm going to be telling you a story that illustrates how DNA can be used in a specific and practical situation, how it can make a really important difference. So what is the Formel's genealogy project? Well it's a project that was set up in order to trace DNA appropriate relatives of soldiers who died at the Battle of Formel on the 19th of July 1916 and may have been buried in a mass grave located in Northern France. So I'm going to give you a brief overview of the battle, how the discovery came about, the initial investigation, how to proceed after the discovery was made, how DNA testing came about, what role genealogy played, how to find those DNA appropriate relatives and how the identities of the men were eventually confirmed. So the Battle of Formel. Formel is a small village town in Northern France, it's about 10 miles from Leo and there's a little under a thousand inhabitants. It was a prized possession of the German army during the First World War. Now Formel is in what we now know of as the Forgotten Front. Nobody knows about the Somme, Yggra, Passchendaele, but Formel isn't the name that readily comes to mind. Here anyway, over in Australia it's a different story, but here Formel is part of the Forgotten Front. It's part of French Flanders and the Germans occupied the strategic ground really during the war. They dug themselves in and made themselves as comfortable as was possible in the First World War. They had what you might call the high ground, although French Flanders is so flat that there isn't really anything like a high ground. But they had an area called the Sugarloaf Salient, which was just a slight ridge and that was enough to give them the strategic advantage. They had machine gun positions in very important places. They built amazing defences, some block houses that still stand in the area to this day. Basically their defensive structure was vastly superior to what the Entente forces had and to attack them there was pretty suicidal. However, it was attempted on three occasions between 1914 and 1916. First time was December 1914 and it ended with a predictable disaster. The second time was the 9th of May, 1915, which was the Battle of Obert Ridge. Again, that was an unmitigated disaster. There were over 11,000 British casualties on that particular day. We move into 1916 and on the 1st of July, 1916, the Great Somme Offensive begins. Back on French Flanders on the Formel Front, the man in charge was Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking. This big idea was to repeat exactly the same attack that had been tried twice before in order to create a diversionary tactic. This was basically a faint. It was to prevent the German soldiers from going to help out their comrades at the Somme more than anything else. There was quite a lot of debate on whether it should take place or it shouldn't, but he got his way and it was put off a few times. The way that they were going to attack was changed a few times and it was put off due to weather on the 18th, but the 19th dawned and clear weather. A seven-hour bombardment, artillery bombardment was the first port of call. That took away all surprise from the move. The Germans had seen it before. They also had a very good vantage point to see everything that the Allies were doing. Not from the ground, per se, but they had created platforms and trees on church towers. They made sorties out into no man's land, irregularly, listening posts. They knew exactly what was coming. And the seven-hour bombardment, unfortunately, fell short, didn't really reach the German lines and didn't cause the damage that they hoped it would cause. And once the infantry started their attack at 6 p.m. in the evening, they were basically lambs to the slaughter. There was followed 14-hour battle and it's one of those occasions, and often when looking at the First World War, you get a stereotypical lions led by donkeys idea put forward. And often this is not accurate, but from El is one of those stereotypical occasions where you can say that it was a truly futile attack battle, whatever you want to call it. It wasn't actually given the name battle for several decades because the regiments involved were not accorded battle owners for it, and it was called an attack. But yeah, it is one of those occasions where it was absolutely futile and they gained nothing from it but a massacre, really. Some small areas of the German trenches were breached by Australian soldiers, but they were not able to hold them and they had to retreat. They were subjected to fierce counterattacks, and by 8 a.m. on the 20th of July it was over. The 5th Australian Division had suffered 5,533 casualties, of which 1,740 were killed. And the 61st British Division suffered 1,547 casualties, of which 503 were killed. The German casualties numbered just over 1,000, 8,000 casualties in 14 hours. It was, as I say, a complete failure, and in fact the Germans had the original order, Hay King's original order in their possession before the end of the battle. So they knew exactly what they were up to before they even had a chance to talk to any of the prisoners. They knew it was a faint and it had no impact whatsoever upon the progress of the Somme Offensive. No ground was gained and all that was left was a mass of destruction. So in a gesture of respect on humanity the German forces at this point offered a temporary truce to permit the safe passage of the wounded from the battlefield and the collection of enemy dead. The commanders on the other side, however, declined this offer. They said that this sort of concession would show weakness and be a bad thing for the morale of the men. So they left the wounded out there. I think the attack, although it failed, has done both divisions a great deal of good. That's the words of Lieutenant General Sir Richard Hay King after the battle. I won't comment on that. Yesterday evening, south of our Montier, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles in which Australian troops took part. About 140 Germans were captured. That was the official Army communique on the events. I suppose it's technically true, but it's rather economical. The 19th to the 20th of July, 1916, isn't known as the worst 24 hours in military history in Australia. It's known as the worst 24 hours in Australian history. The Australian toilet for mail is equivalent to the total Australian casualties in the Boer War, Korean War, and Vietnam War put together in a space of 14 hours. There were 24 sets of brothers and one father and son involved and it is the single biggest loss of Australian life in a single engagement ever. That is why it's well known in Australia and not so well known here. So, as I say, the Allied commanders refused the offer from the Germans to go out and collect the dead. So, this left a number of people out in No Man's Land, dying, wounded, and there are several quite amazing stories that came out of that of heroic actions. One in particular is a Simon phrase, or Sergeant Simon phrase, of the 57th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force, who went out into No Man's Land numerous times and carried wounded men back in on his shoulders. There's no estimate of exactly how many, many brought in, but it's very, very high. He wasn't decorated at the time for it and he actually, unfortunately, died himself the year later at bullcourt and his body was never found. But there is now, in Fromel, a statue dedicated to him and it's of Simon Fraser with a man on his shoulder. So, if you ever go to Fromel, it's called the Don't Forget Me Cobber statue, the Cobbers Memorial and it's called that because on one of his forays in No Man's Land he heard one of the wounded men shout to him, Don't Forget Me Cobber, and that man was brought back in. So, Don't Forget Me Cobber is actually an Irishman, Father John Joseph Kennedy. He was a priest and he was born in Kerry in 1881 and he was appointed a chaplain captain in the AIF in 1915 and on the night of the battle he carried wounded men from the front trenches to the dressing station under heavy shell fire throughout the whole night returning again and again to get more men and he was awarded the DSO for his gallantry and bravery and devotion to duty. He survived the war. So, at this point we have a lot of men who have made it to the German trenches, primarily Australian it was the 8th and 14th Brigade of the 5th Division that made it to the German lines because they had the shortest amount of No Man's Land to traverse from where they started out from. And basically they posed a health risk. They were a sanitation problem to the Germans and they had to deal with them so they decided to bury them and they buried them in a field close by called Boa de Fazón, Pheasantwood. And they did this with respect. They dug eight pits, 50 men to a pit and they filled five of them and left three of them empty. And there they lay. And after the war a commission was set up and a lot of teams went out to try and discover all the graves and obviously a lot of military cemeteries were built and men were reinterred in these cemeteries and a lot of mass graves were found but somehow and nobody is to this day quite sure how this one was missed. This one was overlooked. And the men from the Battle of Formel lay in the field at Pheasantwood for over 90 years. However there had been rumour in Australia because there's so many families out there with relatives who they want to know where they were, what happened to them, where they were buried. And they spent years trying to find this out and sadly the relatives of the day never did find out where they were. But the rumours persisted that this mass grave was out there and in the late 20th century a retired schoolteacher by the name of Lambison Glazos took up the cause with fervour. He basically made its lives mission to find this missing mass grave, to find these men. And he enlisted a band of helpers and he even went to a talk that was given by the military historian Peter Barton in Melbourne and enlisted his help in the process as well. He at first was sceptical as were the authorities. I mean they didn't want to hear that there was a mass grave out there that was mid-miss. They couldn't believe that so a grave that large could have been missed in the 1919 to 1921 searches. So it was a task to convince the authorities to look at it in the first place but Lambis and friends would not give up on that task. They managed to get together evidence from letters from the time talking of the mass grave from evidence that had been given by prisoners taking it from El and one of the most important things they managed to hold of were some aerial trench maps and on ones from June 1916 you could see the ground at Fesentwood was plain and by the end of July and into August and September you could see these eight pits were there. And that was clear evidence. It wasn't enough however to convince the authorities. So further evidence was required and the Bavarian archives in Munich were contacted. Now the Bavarian archives in Munich house hundreds of thousands of meticulously kept documents from the German army in the First World War and most of them haven't been touched since that time. They are an amazing resource and very rarely looked at. So the director of the Bavarian archives came back to Lambis and his friends and he uncovered two important pieces of paper. One was an excerpt from the war diary from the Germans on that day and it stated that they were preparing to bury these men at Fesentwood. He also found the original order, order 5220 that ordered the burial of the men at Fesentwood. So these were game changers. These showed this definitely took place. There is a mass grave that was there. The authorities still were convinced that well even if it was there surely it was found in the 1920s and the men have been moved since but going back to Imperial War Graves Commission evidence and records there was no record of it ever being found. So something had to be done and eventually enough pressure was brought to bear and a team from Glasgow University Archaeology Department were sent out in May 2008 to do an exploratory search in the area and they very quickly found that there was indeed an undisturbed mass grave at Fesentwood. So at this point decisions have to be made. We have a mass grave what do we do with it? Well protocol in France when bodies are found and it does happen with regularity is the man is disinterred. Every attempt is made to identify him if there are positions on him or dog tags etc. And then a place is found for him in a nearby military cemetery and he is buried with full military honours and most occasions given a known unto God grave and if they can identify his uniform then perhaps underneath will be a soldier of the Australian army a soldier of the British army etc. That's the general protocol but when you have 250 that's not so easy. So the first war cemetery to be built since the 1950s was commissioned and that became the task of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Construction began in 2009 and it opened with a dedication ceremony on the 94th anniversary of the battle in 2010. All family members of those identified were invited and everyone who worked on the project. It was a very emotional and proud day seeing this cemetery open up and all of these men laid in graves. All of the 250 men were reburied with full honours in February 2010 except for one unknown soldier who was buried on the day of the opening. So now we get to the DNA part. The next question, when you have these 250 men you're going to build a cemetery that's a given you have to do that. What do you do to identify them? Well you'll have an archaeological dig and a team from Oxford Archaeology were sent in from May 2009 to September 2009 in order to do an archaeological dig. There were anthropologists forensic scientists painstakingly poured over the area to get every last piece of evidence they possibly could and the men themselves were removed to a temporary mortuary awaiting burial in the new cemetery. And at this point the decision was taken to do DNA testing, to extract DNA from the remains of the men and attempt to identify them through DNA and other methods but DNA testing is going to be the key to getting names on graves. So the British authorities and the Australian authorities both compiled lists of the men who had died on the 19th of July but whose bodies had never been found. And they circulated those lists to the media quite widely and hoped that family members would come forward but there was a pretty big flaw in this thinking. It had been over 90 years and the majority of these men were actually boys. They had no families and the majority of the relatives that you're hoping to come forward would be second cousins and great-nephews and people who very well might not know this person ever existed. And even those who did have issue of their own and who had living grandchildren or great-grandchildren very often the information given at the time to the families was incorrect. They were told he died on the psalm and I'll show examples of this but these people might not go looking at this list because, oh, my granddad died at the psalm. So how do you get from the DNA from the men? How do you then get your DNA from the living relatives in order to try and match it up? Well, you need a project to do that. The Formel's genealogy project was set up by a group of volunteers in order to proactively track down DNA-appropriate donors for all of the men on the lists. There were separate projects although they worked in conjunction with Britain and Australia. The British project took on the task of researching the trees of 332 missing men of the 61st British Division and that was an enormous undertaking which has resulted in an ancestry tree of over 18,000 names and counting. The Australian project had a much harder decision to make with over 1,300 missing men that night whose bodies had never been found. It would really take an army of researchers decades to trace donors for them all. So it was decided to concentrate on the 191 of those who appeared on what are called Toten lists, lists of the dead. And these were uncovered by the military historian Peter Barton via the Red Cross archives in Geneva. Now, when the bodies were taken by the Germans from the battlefield what they would do is they would take the dog tags off the bodies and they would send these dog tags to the Bureau in Berlin who would then send them on to the Red Cross in Geneva who would then send them on to the British who would then send them on to Australia who would then send them to the families. So the Red Cross was the correlation, the meeting point for all. Both sides would send possessions and dog tags to the Red Cross and the Red Cross had the unenviable task of administrating administrating death really and the news to all of the different areas and families. So these dog tags unfortunately were no longer on the bodies. The families would have them and great lists were created called Toten lists, lists of the dead by the Germans and these were passed to the Red Cross. So all of the men's names on these lists had gone through German hands. Not all of them would have been buried by the Germans because some of them may have been a bit too far out in no man's land and they would have just taken the dog tags or the possessions and sent them on. But most of them would have been, all of them had gone through German hands so it stood to reason that those on the Toten lists were much more likely to have been buried by the Germans at Formel than the other men on the list of missing. So the Australian project decided to initially concentrate on the 191 names of Australian AIF soldiers on the Toten lists. The other problem with the dog tags is that in July 1916 men only wore one dog tag. By September 1916 the decision had been taken that they should all wear two. Therefore, if a man died in battle and one dog tag was taken off and sent to the Red Cross, the other would remain on him and then if he was later found he could be identified by his second dog tag. Unfortunately that wasn't the case for the Formel's boys. So looking at the DNA, they decided that the tests to be conducted on the men would be Y DNA tests and mitochondrial DNA tests, not autosomal. Only six out of the 250 men did not yield a viable DNA sample. Most of the samples were taken from vascular tooth pulp. Teeth preserved well, they are encased in enamel and that turned out to be the best way of extracting the DNA. Although femur bones, metatarsals and metacarpals were also used for sampling. Initially it was thought that mitochondrial testing would be the best but as time progressed it became clear that two Y DNA donors and two mitochondrial DNA donors for each soldier was the ideal scenario if possible and it wasn't possible in most cases to track down that many donors. So just to go over the, how do you identify your DNA donor? Now as a genealogist you are used to working back. You're used to tracing every line and you have to completely change your mindset. You have to completely change, it's a reverse genealogy in a way and you have to be a bit ruthless. You have to get rid of the idea of tracing every line. You have to think only in terms of what lines yield me a DNA donor and the closest living relative that you find is often not the best match. So you start with your soldier, has your soldier had any children? Well in terms of Y DNA tests and mitochondrial DNA tests since no other sumo test has been undertaken only the sons of the soldier are going to be a DNA appropriate line. I did make exceptions when it came to children of soldiers whoever if I found that the soldier had had daughters I would trace those lines because I felt that morally if there were grandchildren or great-grandchildren from a daughter although they may not be able to take the DNA test they deserved to know that their grandfather or great-grandfather may be buried in this masquerade so I did follow all lines of children but only the sons would be any good in terms of taking the DNA test. So then you have to look at siblings after that and you want to trace both lines but it has to be in specific ways and I'll go on to what those specific ways are in a minute. After siblings, sants and uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles. So looking at mitochondrial DNA only certain female relations of the soldier could have transmitted the same mitochondrial DNA he possessed to future generations. So for a living descendant to share his mitochondrial DNA they have to descend from his mother or his maternal grandmother or his maternal great-grandmother and so on down an unbroken female line however do not disregard men on the end of these lines if the man is alive he is just as good a mitochondrial donor as a woman is. Therefore you're looking for an FU or an Ease they must however be the son or the daughter of a daughter of the mother of the soldier. So they have to be the son or the daughter of a sister of the soldier so long as that sister shares the same mother they have to share the same mother because that could be a half-sister don't discount half siblings either so long as they share the mitochondrial DNA of the mother then you could look at great-nephews and great-nesses and great-nephews and great-nesses and then you're on to looking at cousins but the key aspect is tracing the straight female line from the mother or the grandmother or the great-grandmother of the soldier straight down until you find living descendants and whether those living descendants are male or female doesn't matter so long as they are alive they'll share that mitochondrial DNA and they are a very good mitochondrial donor so moving on to why DNA it's a little simpler the soldier inherits his wichromosone from his father his father in turn inherits the same wichromosone from his father and so on and so forth and you're just basically looking for a straight male line here so if you're looking at your soldier you first look for sons sons of sons, grandsons straight male line, straight down as soon as a female enters it that's a dead end you then looking for nephews so long as the nephew is the son of a brother of the soldier but that brother has to have the same father so it could be a half-brother but so long as he shares the same father he shares the same wichromosone and again great-nephews and first cousins and the key point is look at your soldier he has the same wichromosone as his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather and whatever line you're tracing has to come down a straight male line and they will all share the same wichromosone until you find a living descendant on the end of it who could be your DNA donor so in order to get a positive identification a joint identification board was set up to meet every year for five years and they first met in March 2010 in order to have a positive identification the DNA was key it wasn't the only thing taken into account each year the project's data analysis team examined forensic and artifact evidence historical information, anthropological data so things like height or the estimated age from skeletal remains were important it all had to match up in order for the soldier to be passed as identified the Joint of Identification Board was made up of officials from the Australian and UK military as well as forensic advisors and it considered all available evidence and decided on the identifications the first board that sat in 2010 allowed 75 identifications so 75 out of the 250 men were initially identified, all were Australian this wasn't surprising in a sense because the Australians had such a huge loss during the battle so many more than the British and also because it was the Australians that had been known to breach the German lines therefore it was much more likely that Australians had been buried by the Germans because they got closer it turned out that there were 213 Australian 34 unknown nationality and three British in the end that's the way that the breakdown came about this was a bit of a blow to those of us working on the British trees because obviously out of 332 we only had the chance of identifying three men very, very difficult thing to do anyway, 75 Australians initially identified and then a second special board met just before the opening ceremony of the cemetery in July 2010 and that identified a further 21 men and the boards have met every year since and as you can see, 2011 14 more identifications, 2012 and 2009 2013 and 2005 and 2014, just a few months ago a further 20 men were identified and we now have 144 named graves out of 250 in the cemetery so let's do a bit of a case study this is the British working list and I am going to work on a man named George Cole, Private 5598 so there he is there and it shows that he was in the 27th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and the not known on the end is his birth time so that's my starting point and that's what I have to work from so where do I start? well, I go to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website and as you'll see on this corner it's a find war dead box and you put in his name, George Cole and here we go this is the result of the search and there he is 5598, the third one time so what does it tell us? well it tells us he's a private, we knew that he tells us his service number, we already knew that he's dead also, his regiment the only extra information we get here is panel reference, panel 22-25 of the Loose Memorial there are over 25, there are over 20,000 names on the Loose Memorial of men whose bodies were not found and George is one of those the additional information box here is empty and I'll come back to that but it can be important so where do we go from there? well we go look at the UK soldiers died in the Great War Index and that is an amazing resource it was published in 1921 and it has over 703,000 names of men who died in the Great World War and here we go it gives us his birthplace Abercurdur in Banff, his residence again Abercurdur his death which we know already but enlistment place we don't have that, Perth and the only other thing that's new is this little bit here, Comments formerly 1701 of the Highlands Cyclist Battalion that's new and that's actually quite significant because 25 Scottish men died at the Battle of Romel and 23 of them were in the Highlands Cyclist Battalion it turned out that 150 men of the Highlands Cyclist Battalion had been transferred into the Royal War in May 1916 and the casualty rate for those 150 men is quite horrendous over 50 of them died, 23 on that night and the Highlands Cyclist Battalion was a territorial unit and it was comprised mainly of very young, highly mobile troops and they had been trained to be runners on bikes big, heavy bikes and of course when they got out there that was completely obsolete there was no way you could use bikes in trench warfare and they just had to become regular soldiers so now we know where George is born where do we go from here where we look for his birth and we find that he was born on August 18th, 1894 in Abercorder and his parents are John and Mary Brocke so we then search for their marriage and we look for siblings and we try to find our appropriate DNA lines and here there's the family on the census and at this point we see he already has two brothers by 1901 and straight away we're thinking why DNA lines let's see if we can trace a straight male line sons, grandsons, etc I actually couldn't find a why DNA donor via his brothers but I did find a niece and she was the daughter of one of his younger brothers and obviously therefore she's not the DNA appropriate relative however she's a very close relative so I've rung her up and I got used to doing this spiel I am a World War I researcher, etc, etc from hell, battle, mass grave and before I had got anything else out other than World War I and I can't convey the emotion myself but she just said, oh my uncle George and that was it, I didn't get anything else out and I said yes I am calling about your uncle George and we spent about an hour or so on the phone and she was like I haven't spoken his name in over 45 years how did that happen? you know my George had been her dad, Harry's idol really he was his big brother and he was his idol and when they lost him Harry always spoke of his brother George and she grew up listening to the stories of her uncle George and always being reminded of what had happened to him and the grief that her father felt at his loss and that grief was passed down to her by him and she couldn't believe that after he had gone and those who had known George or those who would speak about George had gone that she never spoke of him and no one to speak and she felt awful that she hadn't told her own children about her uncle George or her grandchildren and she got energised and decided that she was going to do all of these things and she went to visit her cousins widow and managed to get hold of the set photographs of men in military uniform and she phoned me up really excited and she said it might be George hold fire on that and I said well go and see if you can get them copied and send me some copies and whatever you do do not put these originals in the post to me of course she did exactly that special delivery the next day and they turned up and I very quickly realised that they were photographs of First World War boys this is actually a photograph of the whole family and that's George the eldest at the back there but the First World War photographs here they are and I think this was the bit that stopped my heart Seacoy HCB at dinner Seacompany of the Highland Cyclist Battalion at dinner and I did do a bit of research just in case anyone else in the immediate family had been in the Highland Cyclist Battalion but it was highly unlikely and I didn't find any evidence of it there's one boy that's in most of the photographs and there is a photograph of him on his own and this was a photograph taken in late 1915 dated to late 1915 and that would be the correct period for when George joined up and so that is George so we identified him we gave him his name and his face back and this actually shows you just what the parents were told so here we have here George on the gravestone reported missing at the Battle of the Somme 19th July 1916 afterwards reported dead November 1916 aged 21 years and the parents wanted his name on their gravestone they wanted him commemorated because he had no gravestone but this is what they were told this was the misinformation they had never heard from Al the family knew nothing of from Al until I made that phone call in 2009 so moving on to another HDB boy and this is Harry and he actually joined up underage he died from Al on the 19th July age 17 and the family a story goes that he joined up aged 16 because he wanted a bike he was a young boy and he wanted a bike and there he is with his HDB bike they had guns on the front of him and this is his final letter home from the trenches and it is quite poignant it says that he's in the trenches and it's like hell on earth it's been raining for a few days and they're up to their boots heads in muck he asks for little Willie and also Barbara and Maggie and says he's no more to say at present but he remains their loving brother right soon Harry SWAK sailed with a kiss good night sailed with a kiss two sailed with a kisses it's really quite childlike in a way very upsetting I'm just going to move on to this man here and he's one of at least two Irish born men that have uncovered who died from Al and he was Lieutenant Louie Barron and he was born on Christmas Eve 1888 in Linnwick and he was a pupil at the high school in Dublin on Harcourt Street he was the eldest of six children of Jewish immigrants and the family moved to Dublin in 1893 he became a solicitor and actually worked for a well known Republican solicitor during the Easter Rising and is named in a few different witness statements at that time but then he went on to join the army and he also died from Al and we did find a donor for Louie in Ireland but he also was not identified so here is someone who was identified and you may recognise him Corporal Robert Courtney Green the 32nd Battalion of the AIF and that is his grave in the cemetery in Fromel he was one of the subjects of the official documentary that I worked on in 2010 and his mother was a hoarder and she kept everything everything and it was all found in a suitcase lying in an attic untouched pretty much for 90 years and there is an amazing set of letters from Bob's fiance photographs, letters that Bob sent himself his identity tag sent back by the Red Cross his death penny and his official scroll all in the original envelopes and everything and Bob was born in London in 1886 and he wanted freedom and decided that emigrating to Australia and working out there to try and gain a bit of land for himself was the way to go so he did that and he did get a land with his friend Bill they bought a 250 acre plot in Western Australia and they did okay for a couple of years and then there was a couple of years of success of drought and they were struggling financially and Bob had a young family at this point and Bob felt conflicted he desperately wanted to join up and do his duty but at the same time he felt that by joining up he might be condemning Bill and his family to destitution because he would no longer be there to help with the farm and he actually sent a letter to his mother apologising for not doing his duty at that point in time and this was early 1915 he felt so bad about it he could no longer stay out and he joined up and he ended up in the 32nd Battalion of the AIF he trained in Egypt and they were shipped into France at the end of June 1916 and he had died within a month that's the thing about the the Australian recruits and the British recruits that fought in the Battle of Formel none of them had ever seen active service before they fought in France between May and June 1916 and this was their first ever battle, this was their first ever engagement so it was hardly experienced people they were sending over the front so this is his identity tag and you can actually see the ingrained blood still on it this is his scroll and his death penny and this is one and this is his actual Australian Imperial Force attestation papers now the Australian records are absolutely amazing and thankfully survive and his record actually runs to 49 pages yeah and so if you want to they include letters, photographs all sorts of amazing information and newspaper clippings as well as a photograph of his fiance Nancy who tirelessly worked to try and find out what happened to him, she sent letters to all sorts of soldiers she knew had been at the battle she harranged the Red Cross time and again for information and eventually she did find out that he had died with his friend Alan Bennett and they had been wounded so badly that they had to be left behind during the retreat and he died of a stomach wound and those are the famous letters that she sent to his mother I'm just going to go on here to how you find those Australian records so here is the National Archives of Australia and you put in your soldier's name and find him down here service number 1216 this is James Hugh Ross who was also identified he's one of the Scottish men that I worked on who has a named grave now and you then click on up here view digital copy and it brings it up for you and this one has 37 pages again amazing, amazing letters and information inside the service record so if you have any Australian war dead or indeed just men who served in the Australian Imperial Force please go and look up the National Archives of Australia website please and this is Sergeant Jack Marchman who is one of the 20 men to recently be identified and just recently get his named grave a couple of months ago this is a look at the documentary that we made about Formel in 2010 so I'm going to end now by going back to George a lot of people say to me aren't you disappointed you never got any British named graves and that's I take issue with that because I don't find it strictly true quite a number of the Australian graves are well as you see with Bob men who were not born in Australia but born in England or Scotland or Ireland hopefully or Wales but of the 332 men on the British working list yes we don't have any identifications despite all the work we did tracking down DNA donors because there's only three possible men it could be and I say to the idea that I should be disappointed that yes a little but in the main no I'm not disappointed and I'm not disappointed because well I've called this talk from from mass grave to named grave but really I feel it's more about from anonymity to remembrance despite the fact we don't have named graves for most of the men we've worked on we've brought them back to life to family members to people who maybe never even knew they existed I get people telling me that they're going to go and visit the loose memorial and they're going to trace their finger across his name and that they never knew existed you know I get people saying that they've found photographs and they've framed them and they've put them on walls I get people saying that they've downloaded the Commonwealth War Graves Commission commemorative certificate and they're framing that these men are now being remembered and they may not have a name on a grave all of them only 250 could possibly get that but they've got the remembrance of family members and of the world at large bringing their stories back to life and I feel that that's much more important than just the names on the graves and going back to George on the day of the big cemetery opening in France on the 19th of July 2010 his niece gathered her family together because obviously George wasn't identified and went to their little cemetery in Turf to where the grave of her grandparents is with his name on it and she took the photograph that we uncovered of him which I had colourised and enlarged for her and she sat at the grave and they had their own little memorial just for George and I was at the big thing in France and I was thinking this I mean it was such a proud moment to be there and it was something at times but there were a few times throughout it that I thought I wouldn't mind being in a little cemetery in Turf and I always remembered the story that his niece told me about the time as a child that her father, her parents took her to Edinburgh Castle and they came across this massive book of war dead and they opened the book up and they were looking in the French and Flanders section for George's name and they couldn't find him and they closed the book and they went to walk away and the gust of wind blew it open now this may be a bit of poetic licence but we'll go with it the gust of wind blew it open and there his name was on this page and it was under the heading Anonymous and her father was Chris Fallon and she always remembered how sad it was to see his name listed as anonymous and I really think that this whole story is about from being anonymous to being remembered as opposed to just getting the named grave although the named graves 144 out of 250 with the help of DNA is a pretty amazing return. Thank you Thank you Michelle very fabulous, thank you so much for that 49,000 Irish men fought in World War 1 and died in World War 1 30,000 of them with the allied troops and within the the UK and another 19,000 I believe in the allied troops so this is a very relevant presentation for us in Ireland as well how many people actually have people in their family trees who fought in World War 1 right World War 1 practically have everybody in the room so I take what you say about every man remembered and in fact the Royal British Legion have a website now called I think it's everymanremembered.org the Imperial War Museums lives of the First World War project going on now where you can go on and put up remembrance to your own First World War relations as well and I think as genealogists it would be nice if we had not just every man remembered but every man's genealogy remembered so for those of you who are family history enthusiasts why not go to one of these websites why not go to both of these websites and go to the member in your family who fought in World War 1 but leave a link to your tree as well so that their genealogy is remembered as well as the men themselves now we have time for one or two questions we have one here thank you for a very interesting presentation my grandfather died in France in March 1918 and his body was never found and I'm just wondering if you think it will ever become normal to have them as they do occasionally find bodies to take a DNA sample and put it up somewhere publicly so that people who test with family tree DNA or whatever might find a match wow, Maurice shall I answer that you've hit on the $64,000 question Michelle and I are talking about how we actually go about getting the authorities to do DNA testing on the remains of people they find all the time on the western front with road widening schemes farmers digging up their land there is approximately somewhere between 100 and 200 remains found every year on the western front and the current estimate is there are 500,000 soldiers who are still lying on the western front their bodies have never been recovered so there is still a huge number of human remains there so of course if you do a DNA test will you actually be able to match it with anybody very difficult to know I have started a World War I missing in action DNA project of family tree DNA in the hope that we can actually encourage some kind of movement but Michelle and myself have to get together and knock our heads together and see if we can find a way of getting every man's genealogy remembered so that we can identify potential DNA donors within the DNA genealogy encourage those donors to do a family tree DNA test themselves both a wide DNA and mitochondria DNA in the hope that eventually if they do do routine DNA testing on the remains they can actually compare them with a public database such as family tree DNA which currently has approximately 400,000 wide DNA signatures and the largest database in the world is a mitochondrial DNA that's the challenge part of the challenge is that they only do 17 STR markers on the wide DNA test using the forensic laboratory that they currently use and I think one of the challenges that we have to inquire about is is it possible to get more than 17 STR markers on wide DNA preferably up to the 37 that family tree DNA do ideally 67 or 111 the idea being not to identify a close relative of the man who has fallen but to use his wide DNA to generate potential matches for the surname because then if you find the surname it narrows down the number of people you have to look at in the documentary records so that's the kind of project we're trying to develop at the moment and it's still in its early stages but we have had preliminary we've made overtures towards the Ministry of Defense in the UK and various other people as well with the idea that a variety of different groups get involved to try and make this come to pass but that's an excellent question we had one question over here very quickly could it or any of the DNA samples retain could they be tested later of the from Elmen I believe so although the five year cycle of the identification boards meeting is now over the fifth one met in March this year there's a strong hope that especially on the Australian side that there's still a lot of ongoing genealogy work to try and I'm working on some at the moment to try and track down DNA donors for more of the men and obviously if those are tracked down then the testing will be done that has been confirmed so yes the DNA samples will be obtained one final question thanks for the superb lecture just one question I've used obviously the Commonwealth War Against Commission website and Forces war records is there any other site that is particularly you mentioned one there about find UK something where you've got more information about the British side in the Great War you can find that you can get them on CD Rome it's online in a number of different places Ancestry, Find My Past all of these kind of it is free to search yeah it is an Ancestry it's an exceptionally good resource and Ancestry also has the remaining service records for the British soldiers as well and if you can find one they're fantastic the thing about the Australian ones is that they are complete there's none missing, whereas the British ones a large proportion of them were destroyed during the Blitzing World War II but those that survive are digitised and on Ancestry and very well worth a look, no problem great and I think that is the point where we'll have to end this conversation because we could talk about this for a lot longer and I think you've touched the hearts of a lot of people in the audience and it just remains for me to say thank you Michelle for sharing this with us that's fine you have everything? alright sorry about running a little bit glitch the drop dead time is 7 o'clock well in the sense that we get kicked out of here at 7 o'clock we're only going to get kicked out of here at 7 o'clock so don't worry about running a little bit of time for discussion afterwards because that's really really good but now did I put that in the right way and always get these ones wrong whether it's upside down that might be there we go and yours is the GGI and you want both of them let's do both and let's go down