Schedule for DNA Testing and Identification

[Michelle79]

Hi Everyone,

During the meeting I attended the schedule and procedure for DNA testing and identification was also set out. As many of you will know the project is scheduled to last for five years and an Identification Board will sit once each year to decide on how to classify each soldier. In order for a case to be considered by the board at their first sitting next year there is a deadline by which family trees and DNA samples must be submitted and that deadline is drawing near. For those relatives who have already submitted family trees from which suitable DNA donors have been identified DNA packs are ready to be sent out and may even be going out this week. For those who have not submitted their family trees yet these must be submitted by the end of November at the very latest in order to be considered for this first round of identification. If anyone does not meet the deadline their case will be carried over to the next meeting of the ID Board.

The DNA profiling work on the DNA samples will begin properly in the first week of January and the results will be reported to the ID Board which will meet for the first time in March. The ID Board will use the anthropological and archaeological evidence along with the DNA results and circumstantial evidence from the questionnaires in order to formally decide whether each soldier can be identified as an individual and given a named grave, identified as being from a particular regiment or identified simply as an Australian or British unknown. It is clear no information on the Aus-Brit breakdown will be released until the board has sat in March so it's all a guessing game until then. Relatives will be notified of the results in April/May whether or not their relative has been identified and the appropriate categorizations will be added to the headstones. If someone can be accorded a named grave the relatives will be given an opportunity to add an inscription in their own words.

For those of us working on the genealogy side of things this means a bit of a race over the next month to get as many as possible included in the first sitting of the ID Board. The ideal scenario is that 2 Y-DNA donors and 2 MtDNA donors for each soldier can be found but any donors at all will be helpful.

Regards

Michelle