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## The Six Named, the Many Unnamed
As of the May 2026 announcement, six of the 129 Franklin expedition members have been identified by DNA. The other 123 remain anonymous in the physical record — their fates either unknown (most of them) or documented only as remains that have not been connected to any named individual.
The six who have been identified — John Gregory (2021), James Fitzjames (2024), William Orren, David Young, John Bridgens, and Harry Peglar (all 2026) — represent a cross-section of the expedition’s social structure. Gregory was a warrant officer and engineer. Fitzjames was a commissioned captain. Orren was an able seaman. Young was the most junior classification of crew member. Bridgens was a steward. Peglar was a senior petty officer.
Five of the six died at the Erebus Bay site on King William Island. Peglar alone is documented at a different location, approximately 130 kilometers from Erebus Bay. The concentration of identifiable remains at Erebus Bay reflects the site’s specific archaeological character: it has been systematically excavated, its 451 bones have been analyzed and are available for DNA extraction, and the established methodology of comparing against living descendants’ profiles has been applied to its specimens repeatedly as new comparison DNA has become available.
The bones from other expedition sites — the various locations along the King William Island coast where remains have been found, the mainland sites where the march’s farthest-south casualties are documented — have not yet yielded identifications, as far as the publicly available record indicates. This may reflect the specific preservation conditions at those sites compared to Erebus Bay, or it may reflect the prioritization of the most systematically excavated site for identification work.