Unknown Soldier
The process of identifying as many of the Lost Diggers images as possible for this book (The Lost Diggers) has been a painstaking and often frustrating process.
The vast majority of the images were taken with the distinctive painted Thuillier canvas backdrop and that has been a useful fingerprint in identifying Thuillier pictures that had made their way back to Australia into the museum of family collections. Sometimes it has been impossible to be sufficiently sure that a particular image is the person identified by one or more family members. On occasion, more than one family has adamantly claimed a digger image as their own kin, based on a simple visual identification and comparison with family pictures. It has been heartbreaking to sometimes have to contact a family and explain that an image could not possibly be their relative because their service file shows he was never anywhere near Vignacourt, or the badges and rank insignia show that it is another person. Sometimes the identification was easy because the digger features in one of the rare Thuillier images reproduced in Australian histories or personal collections. The detective work in confirming identification has often been done with the kind of assistance of Australian War Memorial historian Peter Burness, who’s knowledge of military battalion badges and medal ribbons and striped frequently facilitated a positive identification. Personal letters and diaries, battalion war diaries and histories, and family photographs (some with captions) have also enabled the positive identification of diggers in the Thuillier images. Often families have ‘claimed’ a Thuillier image is their relative based on the simple perceived match with a family photograph but, as far as possible, this has been cross-checked by referring to personal military service files and battalion histories to ensure that a particular soldier was indeed in the Vignacourt area during the war.
