My local paper recently had an article about a neighbour who has had an unusual result from his family tree work. It seems that his great-grandfather fought in the First World War and was killed on the very last day of the Battle of the Somme; November 13, 1916.
He was 27 when he died and he left behind a wife and a young family. Shortly after his death the family emigrated from England to Australia and a few years later the widow remarried (and so changed her name). With the change of address and the change of name she became virtually untraceable to a hard-pressed Government bureaucracy.
My neighbour was rummaging around the records of the time and noticed that his ancestor was awarded a number of medals and that the medals had never been collected. At the time they had been mailed out to his widow but by that time she had already emigrated so the medals were returned to sender and simply filed away.
After a bit of paper work my 72 year old neighbour, a veteran of the 1950’s Borneo Campaign himself, received his great-grandfather’s medals just in time for the Remembrance Day ceremonies this year.
Some of the points to note from this:
- your are never too old to dig around amongst the ancestors,
- distance is not really a barrier to getting crucial information about your family members,
- there are a lot of reasons why people get involved in genealogy, sometimes it is just curiosity about the life and times of our ancestors,
- you never know what you’re gonna get.
