MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD: HOW WAR DETECTIVES IDENTIFIED MY DISTANT COUSIN
Except for the perfect grammar, it looked like a scam. Then the name of my long-dead mother jumped out at me, followed by that of my grandmother – and finally even a mention of my great grandmother.
“Good afternoon. I apologise for the speculative nature of this letter,” began the email. “I work for the Ministry of Defence. My team is responsible for researching and identifying First and Second World War soldiers whose remains are found…”
The body of a man they presumed to be one Second Lieutenant Leslie Wallace Ablett had been discovered two years before in Belgium, wrote Nicola Nash – and her team believed he was related to me.
The officer was one of nine soldiers found together, deep under the earth, and the artefacts found with them strongly suggested that they belonged to the Northumberland Fusiliers, and had been killed during the Battle of Passchendaele in October 1917.
“Our aim is to identify all these men so that we can give them a full military burial,” she wrote. “We are hoping that you would be willing to give us a DNA sample that can be compared against the samples taken from the remains so that we can try and give these men a name.”
I struggled to take it in, but knew the first thing was to check Nash was who she said she was. The next morning, I found her on Linkedin, with a profile that looked genuine and detailed, with plenty of connections and skills endorsements – as well as a link to a BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour interview.
I messaged her, saying I wanted to verify it was actually her who had sent yesterday’s email.
A minute later: “Hi Rachel, yes it was! I look forward to hearing from you soon.”
Nash is part of a five-woman team known as the Ministry of Defence War Detectives, based at Imjin Barracks just outside Gloucester. Officially called the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre Commemorations team, and with particular expertise in genealogy and archaeology, the sleuths investigate historical casework from the First World War onwards, trying to identify the remains of British armed forces personnel discovered in former battlefields around the world.
Investigating the cases can take years, and despite the team’s best efforts and the modern resources now available, such as DNA tracing, the identities of some soldiers discovered still elude them.
Whether the warriors can be identified or not, part of the war detectives’ job is to coordinate a military commemorative service for all cases they have fully investigated.
In that first conversation with Nash, Leslie’s name rang no bells for me at all. But a year and half later, my late cousin – though three times removed – has become one of my dearest family members. I feel moved and privileged to be able to do what his unfortunate parents, my kin, could not: accompany him on his final journey where he will be laid to rest with love and honour.
Leslie, I now know, joined the military in October 1915, and in May 1916 was commissioned as an officer in the Northumberland Fusiliers, the second-largest regiment in the British Army after the London Regiment.
And in October 1917, at the age of 20, he was killed, probably in a trench, during the Battle of Passchendaele, the notorious campaign that left more than 200,000 dead on each side – between a third and half of all of those who fought.
The number of those who were euphemistically “buried where they lay” defies imagination, since only half of the British soldiers killed at Passchendaele today have known graves. Efforts have gone on ever since to recover the dead and lay them properly to rest, but there are still a significant amount being recovered these days due to the amount of development going on in the area.
After construction workers, turning over earth on the vast former battlefield west of Ypres, stumbled upon what was left of Leslie and his comrades in 2018, Belgian archaeologists excavated and exhumed the remains, and handed the case over to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They then alerted the Ministry of Defence, at which point the war detectives’ work began.
Identifying Leslie provisionally had been easy, Nash told me, because, miraculously, his uniform was virtually intact after 101 years. His identity tags and other personal artefacts were also still with him. But DNA confirmation was essential, not least to narrow down the possible identities of those found with him.
Leslie was born in 1897 into a family comprising his mother, Caroline, his father John Joseph and his older brother Fred. By the 1950s, all four had died, and Fred, who survived Passchendaele, had married but left no children. With the brothers’ father being an only child, there were no uncles or aunts to produce cousins on the paternal side.
So the Ministry of Defence team turned to his mother’s side for a descendant to test, and because of the way DNA tracing works the only option was to trace daughters of daughters.
Leslie, it turned out, was the first cousin of my great grandmother Margaret. Margaret and Leslie’s mothers were sisters. I’m descended right down the maternal line from his aunt, Catherine Church.
Nash had discovered a great deal about my ancestors before she contacted me, some of which I knew already. But it also prompted me to find out more, and I then tracked down some of Catherine’s other descendants. They had information too. Catherine had left a lot of letters, including poems she had written. Among these are letters to her nephew Leslie, who, from what she wrote, was also a poet.
Poignantly, among her letters was a poem she wrote to him in 1915 congratulating him on his commission to the Northumberland Fusiliers – two lines of which will now be engraved on his gravestone.
‘I feel moved and privileged to be able to do what his unfortunate parents, my kin, could not’