How do you name a soldier 109 years after he died? The shirt, the German lists and the DNA behind Australia’s search for its missing

In March 1919, a burial party recovered an unknown soldier near Westhoek in Belgium and moved him to Hooge Crater Cemetery. The man who filled in the paperwork noted one clue: “Anderson on shirt”.

For 107 years that note sat in the record while the headstone said only “an unknown Australian soldier”. On Tuesday night the federal government confirmed he is Lieutenant Andrew Anderson of the 7th Australian Machine Gun Company, a 23-year-old from Bundaberg killed at the Battle of Menin Road on 20 September 1917. An independent researcher had spotted the link and sent it to the Army in 2020.

He is one of 11 men identified in time for Remembrance Day. So how is it done, and why does it take so long?

How many Australians from the First World War have no known grave?

More than 60,000 Australians died in the First World War. Tens of thousands of them were never found, or were buried in graves that could not be named.

The scale is carved in stone. The Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in France carries about 10,770 names of Australians missing in France. The Menin Gate at Ypres carries about 6,190 more for Belgium. At Gallipoli, the Lone Pine Memorial lists almost 5,000 Australians and New Zealanders with no known grave.

Many of those men are not lost at all. They lie in war cemeteries under headstones inscribed “Known unto God”, the words Rudyard Kipling chose for the unknown graves of the British Empire’s war dead. The task is to match a name on a memorial to a body in a grave.

Why were so many buried without names?

Because the Western Front destroyed the evidence. Soldiers were often buried where they fell, under a wooden cross with a pencilled name, and later shelling wiped out the cross, the grave or both. Identity discs were lost or taken. After the war, burial teams spent years moving remains from scattered battlefield graves into the cemeteries we know today, recording what they could: a unit badge, a rank, a name on a shirt.

Some men were buried by the enemy. After the Battle of Fromelles on 19-20 July 1916, German soldiers buried Australian dead in mass graves behind their lines at Pheasant Wood. They sent identity tags and personal effects back through the International Red Cross, so families learned their sons had died, but not where they lay.

How does the Army work out who a soldier is?

The work belongs to Unrecovered War Casualties – Army (UWC-A), with the Office of Australian War Graves, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and researchers in France and Belgium. A case usually runs in four steps:

1. The paperwork. Investigators read service records, unit war diaries, burial returns from 1919 and 1920, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing files, and German regimental archives. The aim is a short list: which missing men could be in this grave?
2. The ground. Where remains are newly found, archaeologists recover them and anthropologists estimate age, height and injuries. Buttons, badges, buckles and personal items can point to a unit or even a person.
3. The DNA. Scientists compare DNA from the remains with samples from living relatives. Bone this old is badly degraded, so labs usually look at two kinds of DNA that survive better or are easier to trace through a family tree: mitochondrial DNA, which a mother passes to all her children, and Y-chromosome DNA, which passes from father to son.
4. The decision. The evidence goes to an identification board. If it is strong enough and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission agrees, the grave gets a new headstone with the soldier’s name, and often a rededication ceremony.

Lieutenant Anderson’s case rested on the records: the Army linked an eyewitness account of his battlefield grave beside a road at Westhoek to the spot where the “Anderson on shirt” remains were recovered in 1919.

Why does a relative’s DNA matter so much?

Without it, there is nothing to match. A soldier who died at 20 usually left no children, so investigators work sideways through family trees to find a living descendant of his mother’s line or his father’s male line.

That is harder than it sounds. Families moved, changed names and lost touch. A child adopted by a stepfather, or a gap in a family tree, can make a likely match fail. The Families and Friends of the First AIF says 54 men on the Fromelles working list have relatives whose DNA has not matched any of the unidentified graves, which suggests some lie elsewhere.

How far has Fromelles come?

Fromelles was Australia’s first major battle on the Western Front and the worst 24 hours in its military history, with about 5,500 Australian casualties. It is also the clearest test of the identification work.

| Fromelles (Pheasant Wood), at May 2026 | Number | |—|—| | Soldiers recovered from the mass grave in 2009 | 250 | | Identified by name, with named headstones | 181 | | Graves still unidentified | 69 | | Identified men who were not on the original list of likely names | 44 | | New names at the 2025 identification board | 0 | | New names at the 2026 identification board | 1 (Private Roy Martin, 30th Battalion) |

Figures from the Families and Friends of the First AIF, May 2026. Private Thomas Easton of the 30th Battalion, a miner from Teralba near Newcastle and one of this week’s 11, also lies at Pheasant Wood.

The mass grave was confirmed in 2007, after years of work by Melbourne researcher Lambis Englezos and a team of supporters, and was excavated in 2009. All 250 men were reburied with full military honours in the new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery in 2010. Each new name since has depended on someone giving DNA, a researcher reading an old file differently, or a dig turning up a badge or a button.

Note the fourth line of the table: 44 identified men were not even on the original list of who might be there. The records were good, but not complete.

Is it worth it, more than a century later?

For families, it ends a question that has run through four or five generations. For the Army, it is a standing commitment that now reaches beyond 1918: this year it also named unknown Australians from the Second World War, including at Kokoda.

It also changes how a cemetery reads. “Known unto God” becomes a man with a hometown: a lieutenant from Bundaberg, a miner from Teralba, four field ambulance men killed together at their aid post at Bullecourt in May 1917.

Can my family help?

Yes, if you think you are related to a missing Australian soldier. UWC-A takes registrations through an online form on the Australian Army website, and asks registered relatives for DNA samples when a case needs them. Useful things to have ready: the soldier’s full name, service number and unit if you know them, and how you are related, especially whether the link runs through his mother’s family or his father’s male line.

You do not need to prove anything before you register. A name on a family tree that nobody else has connected may be the missing link.