Interested researchers might also try geni.com. They're a bit more "open"
than Ancestry as regards searching. One big advantage to geni, I've found,
is the fact that when adding individuals, they'll report matches to already
existing family data entered by others, as well as the ability to merge
duplicate records. So it often turns out that just adding a few of one's
own "known" records on individual family members turns up a duplicate,
which then opens lots of other avenues when connected via a record merge.
In my own case, using it finally provided connections from my maternal
grandfather to all sorts of Finnish family members, where I'd been stymied
for literally decades by a combination of language issues and insufficient
data.
No connection with them other than as a satisfied customer.
On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 11:13 AM Chris Barker <ftog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Martin
>
> Good luck with your search, and thanks (and to Jez) for that information.
>
> My mother is still alive but with incipient dementia and a failing
> long-term memory; she did write some memoirs around 10 years ago, but they
> were sketchy and only partially accurate. The person with almost
> encyclopaedic knowledge her sister-in-law, my aunt, but she’s lying
> immobile and with failing everything in a care home near Glasgow after a
> stroke at Christmas.
>
> I’m inclined to try to see my grandfather’s war records, but now will
> probably be a bad time . . .
>
> Chris
>
> > On 4 Apr 2020, at 16:30, Martin Walters <mwalters1440@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > 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> <
> 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 . . .
>
> --
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>
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Scott
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