Tracing regimes took a technoscientific turn in the last half of the 19th C. Society responded to growing populations, systems of authority, regimes of control, and disciplining groups and individuals. This essay looks to explore the portion of these regimes pertaining to individual identity, identification science, and exploration of who we are and to whom do we belong.

Scientific measurement, observation, and classification adopted by legal medicine, anthropology, crime investigation and control of criminals faced social challenges. Large urban population centers, and expansion-ship frontiers raised the need for determination of identity with certainty and proof. Scientists and governments asked questions of lineage, and the correlation of traits and behaviors with identities.

The most direct efforts to specify individuals in the late 19th Century drew from funded and state focused efforts to identify criminals, control undifferentiated populations, and establish regimes of hierarchy for rights, status, and group identities. Bertillonage established a consistent measured technical and repeatable process to document and record durable features and dimensions of identity.

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These trends led to the establishment of fileable cards, indices, and photographs that could be transmitted, compared and establish identity despite socially obscuring claims, forgeries, and details that could defeat recognition by glance or inspection of similarity.

Fingerprinting also emerged as a means of individual identification for criminal investigation, distribution of wages, tallying, and discriminating colonial populations. The statistical and orderly permanence of preserved ink, categorization guides, and indexing offered a promise of certainty for state investigations and systems of control.

Political trends including democracy, labor, mass production, and global trade influenced both individualism, standardization of sizing, race understanding, colonial imperialism and nationalism. Cultural trends of around war and death, from enlistment standards, to modernizing of death care and memorializing rituals were also met by both military and humanitarian commitments to individual recognition and identification.

Two paths we follow:

identity as a locus of control, discipline, and descriptive/proscriptive naming.

identity as a uniqueness, endowed with rights, universal needs, and capacity for self and familial worth.

Global and local conflicts of the first half of the 20th C. led to deaths of millions of civilians and military service members. The tracing of the people involved, targeted, conscripted, concentrated, captured, and mobilized leveraged all these identification methods and invented new ones to scale and accelerate the naming and identifying of individuals.

From a humanitarian perspective this discussion will focus on International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the efforts to identify military and civilian war dead. Building upon a movement to recognize human suffering and dignify the individual and the people affected by warfare, confinement, displacement, and wounds, and death.

The ICRC Central Tracing Agency provided a neutral effort to provide means of tracing and communication with prisoners, internees, displaced and hospitalized individuals. A tracing file could be started and supported by state level data, administrative information and correspondence from and to affected persons. These efforts relied upon translation, transmission, and innovations like IBM Hollerith Cards.

Who cares about finding us and knowing us?

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The United States wartime mobilization included 16,000,000 in uniform. In addition to factories, logistics, and communication networks, all individuals must be traceable for pay, qualification, and recognition. The Federal Bureau of Investigation managed fingerprint records for all of the inductees into the military added to the criminal and prison population fingerprint system.

Individuals on the battlefield were increasingly identified by durable insignia, uniforms, equipment, identification tags. Care/control for armies, prisoners, wounded, deceased worked within growing administrative organization. Prisoners were numbered, even tattooed. Refugees were listed and controlled. “Name, Rank, and serial number’ to permit identification and communication, medical and physical records, dental charting, laundry marks, personal effects, photographs, official stamps and papers, dates of birth, hometown, family contact data.

These variables all collected and employed to serve the prosecution and aftermath of war. Remembering the patriotic veterans, dead, family sacrifice and social tragedy of conflict

The 1940s, a turbulent decade+, saw identification sciences and their legal application in service of justice, comfort, recognition, and remembrance. The prosecution and recording of war documented the tragedies including realtime and emerging events. These investigations and reporting applied legal and journalistic techniques to reveal, publicize, contest, and polemicize the prosecution of war. Examples like the Katyn Massacre, the Nanjing Massacre, the Liberation and recovery of Dachau illustrate both the application of truth seeking, preservation of evidence and contested truths.

In 1939 in the United States, the University of Chicago anthropologist Wilton Krogman published “A Guide to the Identification of Human Skeletal Material” in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. This collected understanding of the human skeleton from anatomists, human evolution study, archaeology, museum collections and criminal cases.

Even remains reduced to bones could be individually known. Nations and peoples sought to search for all traces, at least memories of what was done, and who was lost.

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The United States American Graves Registration Service of the Quartermaster Corps held responsibility to collect identify and manage the American dead. The British Commonwealth established commonwealth cemeteries overseas, and the RAF pursued answers with the Missing Research and Enquiries Unit. The 1906 and 1929 Geneva Conventions guaranteed certain duties and responsibilities for sepulcher and dignified treatment of the dead. The postwar global politics aimed to establish more humane and dignified treatment for all peoples

• 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• 1949 Geneva Conventions

• 1945-1949 International Military Tribunals.
  

These efforts to provide recognition of common humanity, deplore aggression, and crimes against humanity also turned to sciences of anthropology, sociology, and understanding of heritage and lineage. The 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race describes a moral and scientific consensus about the meaning and usage of race for understanding groups and individuals.

Consensus about individuals… What of the deceased?

Approaching ten years on from the departure of U.S. military presence inside Vietnam and the 1975 abadonment of U.S. presence in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The prospect of normalizing and moving past the social and political quagmire became a political goal. In the election year of 1984, President Reagan and his Defense Secretary sought to crystalize the closure of that American chapter with the dignified ceremony of the entombment of an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War. This symbolic and patriotic marker would allow the moving on from the past.

The U.S. Army continued with the mission to recover and identify the dead. During the war, the recovered dead were processed in mortuaries and then returned to the United States for final disposition at the decision of the next of kin. Modern warfare, technology, and remote geography created a challenging context for remains recovery and identification. The homeland political controversies over the draft, the Pentagon Papers, and importantly the return of prisoners following the Paris Peace Accords. The veterans and public were deeply untrusting and resentful over the political conduct of the Vietnam War.

“Today, we pause to embrace him and all who served so well in a war whose end offered no parades, no flags, and so little thanks. We write no last chapters. We close no books. We put away no final memories.”

– Ronald Reagan, Memorial Day 1984

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Secretary Weinberger requested the selection of an unknown for the interment ceremony from the unidentified remains at the small U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. The laboratory utilized the same scientific and administrative model developed in WWII and the Korean War, continuing the mortuary based model distilled into technical manuals and performed by identification specialists. None of the unknowns matched the previous wars’ criteria in terms of completeness of the remains, and identifications had continued in small numbers from residual mortuary cases, and remains turnovers.

The families and widows of the Vietnam POW/MIA cases believed not to have been returned and potentially still alive in Southeast Asia, had gained a visible and potent voice among veterans and Americans who felt disrespected and forgotten from the Vietnam War.

An unknown was entombed on Memorial Day 1984, but 1985 witnessed a series of scandals and accusations about the handling and accuracy of the remains identifications of U.S. Servicemembers from Vietnam. In 1986, the government commissioned internationally renowned Forensic authorities to set the course back to trusted and defendable scientific identification

The commissioners found a laboratory using dated methods, unverified techniques, and out of touch with the knowledge gains of applied forensic sciences.

In May 1972, the pilot of an American A-37B Dragonfly crashed in South Vietnam as a result of enemy fire. Remains were later turned over to the US Army by friendly forces and processed at the Da Nang Mortuary. In 1973, all unidentified remains from the Vietnam mortuaries were evacuated to Thailand where a Central Identification Laboratory was established at Camp Samae San.

These were now military administrative processes. The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps managed unidentified remains from the Vietnam War. They followed technical manuals and employed identification specialists. The process had evolved into a military administrative task with inputs and presentation of data to the ranking authority. Although some of the mortuary and identification staff had been involved in WWII and Korean War identification, the identification sciences and forensic specialization had changed dramatically in the academic and non-military medico-legal spheres.

In addition, public and family expectations had built a powerful poiltical base to change the adminstative accounting for the dead into one based around the families and loved ones of the missing and the dead.

Families – women founded The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia and incorporated in the late 1960s They powerfully advocate on behalf of the families and loved ones of those missing, prisoner, potentially prisoner, and potential living to this day. It is their flag that now flies just beneath America’s Flag as a commitment “You are not forgotten”

It may be that forensic science has reached the point where there will be no other unknowns in any war.

—William S. Cohen, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 1998

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Veterans and family members held information hard-won independently of official channels and through rallying political pressure for hard facts. The families and veterans groups knew that the remains designated X-26 from Da Nang Mortuary had circumstantial and material evidence associated with Lieutenant Blassie.

The renowned forensic scientists had begun evaluating the CILHI procedures and methods in the mid 80s. In 1987, Dr. Ellis R. Kerley became the Senior Anthropologist or Laboratory Director. In the early 1970s Dr. Kerley and Dr. Clyde Snow had established to the Physical Anthropology Section of the American Association of Forensic Sciences.

In 1955-56 Ellis Kerley had worked at the Kokura, Japan based Central Identification Unit to identify Korean War dead evacuated to Japan for processing. All war dead from that conflict were returned for final deposition in the United States at the direction of the next of kin, or if unidentified in the American Cemetery in Honolulu, Hawaii with a single unknown entombed at Arlington National Cemetery. Kerley had subsequently obtained his PhD from University of Michigan had worked with Army Pathology and then as a professor and practicing forensic anthropologist, founding the American Board of Forensic Anthropology in 1979.

The dynamics of the formerly administrative identification methods built on procedures and protocols trapped in the past and resistant to innovation changed the scientific culture of the identification processing. The Laboratory grew in professionalism and board-certified forensic staff. Advocacy from the public ultimately led to the 1998 exhumation and identification, confirmed with DNA testing, of the Vietnam Unknown now forever named as 1st Lt Michael J. Blassie.

The management of the dead, searches for missing people, and identifying human remains demands an understanding of how to search, how individuals have been known, organized among the masses, yet unique by name, by data, by lived ephemeral moments alone and shared with their loved ones or pains inflicted upon them.

Data management for humanitarian forensics requires organization, preservation, and discoverability of overlapping, fragmented, and unrecognizable details. The activity of the event or events that led to a person becoming missing, the data available, both that information available at the moment of loss and the recoverable data and matrices that can be sifted for clues. Missing persons cases have much missing data amid the complex weaves of humanity, geography, and marching time. Recovered evidence, data of those that were found, procedures and systems available then and now to provide foothold to investigate and advance a case.

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Missing persons as we understand them today, are reported to the authorities, to friends, posted on signboards, listed on records from disasters, calamities, conflicts, and desperation. Each context has unique challenges, but long term missing persons require investigation and review of before and after data, last known location, hospital lists, police records, military records, transportation and border data. Data for recognizing them even if they cannot intelligbly speak their own name or have succumbed to grievous injury, exposure, or hidden in a clandestine grave.

The challenge, that direct paths to answers, the straightforward explanations, the Occam’s razor solutions, and fortunate discoveries solve almost all cases, especially with prepared and well qualified expertise. The long term missing, mass casualty responses, post-conflict, and cold cases share the characteristic of missing data, challenges of access, authorities, and support.

Listening for the dead to answer, we turn to the lessons of the history and current application of the dead teaching the living.

Missing persons cases begin with many questions. The collecting, structuring, and usage of the data willl need to support many questions requiring answers. Following the data management approaches of identity records discussed above, having categories, indexes, catalogs, and large data storage are vital to keep data ready to help form and answer the diverse questions asked by loved ones, authorities, investigators, and the public.

Who witnessed the event?

Where is the suspected location?

Where are the medical and dental records?

Are there photographs, maps, or DNA profiles and references?

A hallmark of longterm missing person cases is lots of missing data. Many of these questions have been asked but the answers were negative, incomplete or impossible to interrogate. “The best witness died three years ago, maybe their child remembers what they had heard them say.”

The recovered evidence is always a small subset of the universe of clues. Complete bodies, forensically recovered evidence, and searches of records in archives may be complete yet difficult to piece together an answer to the question of the identity of recovered human remains. Often the cases involve broken, fragmented, burned, and lost records, and obscured incomplete puzzles that troubled the seasoned professional.

Acts of tracing involve multidisciplinary and expert investigation The management of this data must include approaches that provide for multidisciplinary teams to discover the available data, contribute analyses and descriptions, as well as programmatically advance together the individual cases and caseloads.

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However, the data planned for, collected, operationalized, shared, reported, and preserved for seeking the missing and identifying the evidence is also sensitive, and deeply personal both to the living or the deceased individual as well as the families and procedures of the authorities and humanitarian workers. Do the people who know you best know the subtle variation of your bones and teeth? Are there buried secrets in your lineage and names? Did anyone ever see you after you left your village, or see you stowaway aboard the vessel? Can the authorities be trusted with your DNA and all of your families?

Key Points for Humanitarian Forensics and Management of data of the missing and unidentified.

• Answers and inquiry must aim at demonstrated care for the missing person or recovered human remains and those who most miss them.

• Transparency of methods, techniques, and qualifications of expertise

• Cultural understanding and dignified handling of the deceased and any recovered evidence

• A commitment to communicate answers and interpretation of available data and records

• Sensitivity to handle delicate and fraught situations including personal, cultural, institutional and political

Data quality, data accessibility, and data trust have some specific levels of importance at all stages of a lifecycle of activity for any missing person case and specifically for the long term missing a decade on or longer.