Finding stuff out about your family

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Great great great grandfather was in the front ranks of the Chartists at Peterloo
His great grandfather was a Colonel in the New Model Army
Another relative fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie and was hung drawn and quartered
Great Uncle was a medical orderly in WW1, served at Gallipolli, his son fought at D-Day
 


My Dad’s brother was killed during WW2 on Lancaster ND994. It was a. Royal Canadian Airforce plane and he was the only RAF man on the flight. I was contacted last month by someone who had been researching his family tree and it turns out we’re 4th cousins. He was born and raised in Canada. I knew that one of my great grandfather’s brothers had emigrated to Canada so it didn’t come as too much of a surprise.

Spooky coincidence though, one of his cousins on the other side of his family was part of the same Lancaster crew as my uncle.
Spooky coincidence number 2, this 4th cousin of mine lives less than 30 miles from me in Houston.
 
Billy Fish said:
Do you have to pay for the war diaries now Paddy, I thought they were “free” if you had an ancestry subscription (which you have to pay for!)
I enjoy looking through them although some are better than others, the wife’s great uncle was with the ANZACS and their diary was brilliant with the detail.

One of my G Uncles was with 2nd Byrne DLI and went to France at the outbreak of war with the BEF, by the time he was killed in Sept 15 90% of those originals he went with were already casualties. The diaries show their was no action at the time he was killed but I visited his grave at Ypres and he was in a row of about another 5 DLI lads all killed the same day, he was one of the oldest at 20 and I assume it was a few lads from Durham huddled up got hit by a shell.
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Diaries are £3.50 a time from the national archives.
 
My uncle Douglas was a Spitfire pilot in ww2. He was shot down over the Med in 1941. No wreckage was ever found.

And at the wedding of an ancestor in the 1700s, at Bothal, two of the guests drank themselves to death !
 
tonyfromalnwick said:
My uncle Douglas was a Spitfire pilot in ww2. He was shot down over the Med in 1941. No wreckage was ever found.

And at the wedding of an ancestor in the 1700s, at Bothal, two of the guests drank themselves to death !
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May God rest his soul mate.

My grandad was a POW on the Burma Railway for four and a half years and even though I knew a little bit of the story such has he was rescued but captured when the ship he was on was bombed and sunk, a few months ago I found out a little more of his story from an uncle.

He was in The Sunderland Echo as 'Missing presumed dead' but when Burma was liberated he was found. What I did not know was that while he had to wait a few weeks or so to gain strength, so he was fit to travel. He caught malaria in hospital so was deemed not fit to travel on the ship he and other POWs were booked on to be took back home. That ship he was meant to be on was bombed and sunk on it's way back with a great loss of life. He was lucky to have caught malaria, ironically, it saved his life.
My mam was born a year after he came back, so it is strange to think, if he had not caught malaria and had been on that second ship to be sunk, I would not be here now and would never have existed.
 
Lankester Merrin said:
Great great great grandfather was in the front ranks of the Chartists at Peterloo
His great grandfather was a Colonel in the New Model Army
Another relative fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie and was hung drawn and quartered
Great Uncle was a medical orderly in WW1, served at Gallipolli, his son fought at D-Day
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Troublemakers then :cool:
 
My Great great grandfather was born in 1822 he joined the army in 1840 and served 13 years in India and then 6 years in Gibraltar. He served in the 25th Regiment of Foot (Kings Own Borderers) and got to be Colour Sergeant but was broken to the ranks and given 6 months in 1852 . He was charged with going AWOL but wasn't whipped as part of the punishment which was odd because that was pretty standard sentence those days.

Stranger still on his release from prison his army record says "Good Conduct Pay restored by authority of the War Department". I have no idea how a man in prison despite being a former NCO might get "good conduct pay" but a few days later his record shows that a senior officer stops it.

He missed the Crimean War as he was stationed in India and by chance his regiment moved from India in 1856 just a few months before the horror of the Indian Mutiny began so he was never involved in any of the major wars or conflicts of the Victorian period despite his 26 years of Army service. He did rise through the ranks again to become a sergeant but never Colour Sergeant

It has to be said that as a soldier in the mid C19th he was counted a being of the "scum of the earth". He doesn't appear to have had VD which one third of the toops in India did although I doubt that as young man he managed to exist 13 years abroad without seeking the friendship of a lady. It must have been an extraordinary hard life as when he married on his return from India his wife and kids would have had to share a common dormitory that was occupied by other soldiers and their families with only a curtained off area for privacy.

His wife and two sons accompanied him to Gibraltar where they had a daughter. It was because the Army kept a separate record of children born abroad to British soldiers that I managed through his daughters birth to discover the name of his regiment and through that his Army record or else he would have been lost to our family forever
 
TopCat said:
Great stuff. I did some research into my Mum's side of the family a few years back. My Great-Grandfather had 5 kids with his wife then left to fight in WWI. He led one of the battalions that dug the trenches over in Ypres. He survived 4 years of the war then came back and had 4 more kids with his wife. He left the army and went down the mines. He died in a mine collapse in 1921 aged 45 when his youngest son (my Grandfather) was 6 weeks old. His widow never re-married and brought up 9 kids on her own
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Survived the trenches to come home and die in a pit accident, that's terrible mate
 
It’s quite interesting what you can dig up. Turns out a great grandad was jailed for stabbing someone in the street as a teenager, and later for burglary (he’s on a Habitual Criminals Register, it says he had a Buffalo Bill tattoo on his chest) then fought in WW1 and was ‘blown out of trench’ at Ypres and sent home to help build a bridge, which he fell offand died. Another grandad also in WW1 was wounded twice, once shot in the face and a year later in the shoulder. Also it turns out our family surname isn’t our original name, but was changed in the 1850s, not 100% on the reason but most probably to avoid charges of horse theft.

DId the DNA test as well and that’s thrown up a couple of surprises I’m still trying to get to the bottom of.
 
Manny F said:
It’s quite interesting what you can dig up. Turns out a great grandad was jailed for stabbing someone in the street as a teenager, and later for burglary (he’s on a Habitual Criminals Register, it says he had a Buffalo Bill tattoo on his chest) then fought in WW1 and was ‘blown out of trench’ at Ypres and sent home to help build a bridge, which he fell offand died. Another grandad also in WW1 was wounded twice, once shot in the face and a year later in the shoulder. Also it turns out our family surname isn’t our original name, but was changed in the 1850s, not 100% on the reason but most probably to avoid charges of horse theft.
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The great grandad with the buffalo Bill tattoo sounds fascinating.
 
Jon Dough said:
The great grandad with the buffalo Bill tattoo sounds fascinating.
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He does but at one point he also got done for deserting his wife and kids (went back later according to censuses) and timing of some docs suggest it’s possible he might only have joined up in 1914 to avoid jail.
TopCat said:
Great stuff. I did some research into my Mum's side of the family a few years back. My Great-Grandfather had 5 kids with his wife then left to fight in WWI. He led one of the battalions that dug the trenches over in Ypres. He survived 4 years of the war then came back and had 4 more kids with his wife. He left the army and went down the mines. He died in a mine collapse in 1921 aged 45 when his youngest son (my Grandfather) was 6 weeks old. His widow never re-married and brought up 9 kids on her own
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One thing that comes out a lot is how hard it could be for women, what they had to put up with and how they just seem to have got on with it. In our tree theres a few whose husbands died early and it seems to have been common for people to lose children. Two lost a husband and all 3 of their kids by the ages of 30 and 40, around the end of the 19th century.
 
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[QUOTE="Manny F, post: 31350923, member: 39382"

One thing that comes out a lot is how hard it could be for women, what they had to put up with and how they just seem to have got on with it. In our tree theres a few whose husbands died early and it seems to have been common for people to lose children. Two lost a husband and all 3 of their kids by the ages of 30 and 40, around the end of the 19th century.
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My mam who was born in 1926 was called Beatrice. I discovered that this was a family name passed down through the family form the mid C19th to the first born girl . Although she was the fourth such namedl she was the only Beatrice in the family who actually survived childhood and went on to live a long and fulfilled life.

Diseases that pass for childhood illnesses now were very cruel killers those days. My mam often said that even in the 1930's it wasn't unusual to be told that a little playmate who you were with the week before wouldn't be able to come to play again and that an empty desk at school wasn't unusual.
 
Had a bit of an update on this.

Found out my grandad was shy of his sixteenth birthday when he joined up and lied about his age. I've been told he served in Mesopotamia so from that guessing he ended up in the 51st Highland Division after the Somme.

Apparently his time in the middle east gave him a lifelong hatred of camels.
 
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