Update

[MelPack]

Although the SPVA now refuse to supply updated lists which are clearly vital for the continuation of our work, Kevan Jones, the Minister for Veterans, has confirmed that relatives for 199 of the missing soldiers are being processed.

Leaving aside the relatives of four of the soldiers who were either killed on the Somme or miles from Fromelles, this means that we now have about 60% of the 331 missing soldiers of the 61st Division covered.

The first annual cycle of the identification process has now closed which means that soldiers whose relatives are traced from now on until this point next year will not be eligible for consideration by the Identification Board until March 2011.

This will at least allow us the time to review our work. If the March 2010 Identification Board confirms that if any of the 20-30 Brits are identified and are drawn exclusively from the ranks of the 2/7th Warks and 182nd MGC (as we suspect) then it will clearly be appropriate to re-orientate our approach.

Mel

[Tjap]

Well done Mel. I must say that you have achieved an astounding response.

I have just completed concatenating (lovely word that :-) ) the various lists. As with all such beasts the devil is in the detail and there were a number of discrepant points between all the lists, and the British Missing List of 25 August 09 didn't help by having attached officers but not the units they were attached to and used various nomenclatures for the different regiments and battalions.

The present round of identifications should prove a good test of the highest likelihood list to which you allude.

A summary of this list shows that contact was made with relatives in 41 out of the 45 soldiers concerned. The SPVA had been contacted for 29 of the 45 on your October SPVA Contact list with a further contact being inferred from one name being missing from the "7 Nov British priority list" making a total of 30/45 or 67% with known SPVA contact.

If the apparent improvement between the October contact list and the final no of tests taken forward by SPVA was applied to the 11 of the 45 with contact only, the final number of soldiers from the 45 who might be in the frame could be as high as 34 or almost 76% which should give a very fair test of the hypotheses.

All the best to all for 2010.

Howard

[topsey1234]

Well done Mel. I must say that you have achieved an astounding response.

I have just completed concatenating (lovely word that :-) ) the various lists. As with all such beasts the devil is in the detail and there were a number of discrepant points between all the lists, and the British Missing List of 25 August 09 didn't help by having attached officers but not the units they were attached to and used various nomenclatures for the different regiments and battalions.

The present round of identifications should prove a good test of the highest likelihood list to which you allude.

A summary of this list shows that contact was made with relatives in 41 out of the 45 soldiers concerned. The SPVA had been contacted for 29 of the 45 on your October SPVA Contact list with a further contact being inferred from one name being missing from the "7 Nov British priority list" making a total of 30/45 or 67% with known SPVA contact.

If the apparent improvement between the October contact list and the final no of tests taken forward by SPVA was applied to the 11 of the 45 with contact only, the final number of soldiers from the 45 who might be in the frame could be as high as 34 or almost 76% which should give a very fair test of the hypotheses.

All the best to all for 2010.

Howard

Howard

I received a letter from the SPVA on Christmas Eve giving me an update as a relative.

The numbers quoted in it are:

203 soldiers on their working list.

78 families have been identified for DNA testing.(The letter makes the point that some trees to not lead to the identification of suitable donors).

197 DNA sampling packs issued.

I'm also told that a data analysis team (DAT) starts work on 11th January going through the information collected to date with the aim of identification. Their recommendation go to the joint identification board on 10th March and that the same timetable will exist for the next four years. So presumably any info collected from now on will now go forward for 2011.

Well done on the researches.

Richard