Friday 1 June 2012

More family history stuff

I'm still busy using up our free credit on the family history side of things so there won't be so many posts on here for a little while.

Had an exciting find today. We had a death certificate for one of my great grandfathers but were not 100% convinced it was his, so we put the details in italics to remind us to try and find out. Anyway, I knew the name of his surviving son and they were the correct age to have served in WWI (I am descended from one of his daughters).

Sometimes, you can find what you are looking for relatively quickly (excuse the pun) but no details were exact matches so I decided to investigate them all (15 of them). Eventually we struck lucky although his son, who we believed should have been in Northamptonshire was in fact in Nottinghamshire.

After about 5 pages I finally found his next of kin – it was his father – in the same hospital/workhouse we already had the death certificate for. Poor man, he died in 1933 and this link was finally proved correct by his son's attestation papers in 1915. Wonder if he was in there for all that time (died of cancer).

Yesterday had another piece of good luck. I had already found the Boer War and what I thought were all WWI attestation papers for one of my great great grandfathers (quite a fighting man judging by the amount of times he was arrested during service!!).

Then I found 7 other lots of papers for the same name. Investigated them all and eventually came across 57 of his papers for more WWI service plus letters he had written fighting to get his pension (he had served under one name, found out he was adopted and reverted back to his birth name after the war).
Good eh!

Quite a dull but warm day today so have been busy in the garden, planting up more vegetable, flower and wild flower seedlings. Just got to do 2 planters of night time stock and phlox and I'll be done.

4 comments:

  1. Fascinating story.I got lots of information about my grandads war service from the Boer war and WW1.It gives all sorts of information including his sick records, its been lovely to read them and get an insight of what sort of man he must have been.

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    1. Yes it is interesting isn't it. I'm certainly interested in my g.g. grandfather's arrests for fighting!

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  2. Persistence and patience certainly pays off! Yesterday J met his namesake at work. We have a very unusual surname and he'd been told that there was someone with exactly the same name working at the hospital.They share the same great grandfather,and there are so many similarities in family names and places of work that it's slightly spooky.

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    1. Did J. always know about his namesake at work? How lucky, if you haven't already got info from them, you might be lucky to be able to fill in some blanks.

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