Chris:
My sister and I are in the same position, with only our mother still
living (but very poorly). We have lots of questions about old photos and
relations that would be easy to answer otherwise. Indeed, some will
never be answered now.
We ended up signing up for Ancestry to try and rectify things. We found
that it was quite useful, but with limited information after 1911 (the
last available census). You do have to be quite careful to pick the
right person..... It's amazing how many people of the same name and
place were born/married or died in the same year. We found information
on other family trees, some good, some clearly mixed up.
Ancestry does have service records, though patchy. I also joined Forces
War Records briefly. In our case, we still have one grandfather who's
records are not available publicly. His brother's (he died in 1913), on
the other hand, are available and make interesting reading. I also read
that a significant part of the records were lost during bombing of the
War Department in the 1940s.
Martin
On 2020-04-04 6:19 a.m., Chris Barker wrote:
My maternal grandfather served in both World Wars, mostly as a pilot, but also
as an engineer (from what I can gather). He worked in Iraq (where he was
interned during the revolution of the 1950s), Ghana and India as a railway
engineer after the Second World War and I last saw him a couple of years before
he died in 1993, just short of his 100th birthday.
I’ve started taking a (belated) interest in his career and his ancestry, but it has
been impossible to find out anything about his parents. So i thought to check through some
of his early photos for clues. I’ve scanned a few and put them in a mid-March blog
entry:
http://cbimages.uk/?p=700 <http://cbimages.uk/?p=700>
The photo of him and some young lady wearing an army tunic is a little strange, but
he’s not here to defend himself or his motives . . .
Chris
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