Auntie Joan’s anecdotes

We recently celebrated the 100th birthday of my oldest living relative. Auntie Joan isn’t strictly my auntie – she’s my grandad’s cousin, which makes her my second cousin twice removed, but who knows what that means, and ‘second cousin twice removed Joan’ hardly trips off the tongue. So Auntie Joan it is. My mum has had a close relationship with Joan for over 60 years so she has always been a part of my life.

Joan has dementia now so conversation is limited but she can still tell stories about the past. She talks a lot about her parents, Lily and William, who met through the Salvation Army just after the First World War. In 1936, when Joan was almost 15, her dad took her to watch the Jarrow Marchers as they passed through Leeds. It clearly made an impression on her – 80 years later she could still remember how worn and ragged-looking the marchers were.

Joan and I are related through her father, William Ellis, and my grandad’s mother Emily who were siblings. Our common ancestors, their parents William Ellis and Alice Martha Boyce, married in 1896 at Leeds Parish Church, now Leeds Minster. They are both listed on their marriage certificate at addresses in Church Lane, which is not the first time I’ve found couples marrying who lived within a few streets of each other. William, aged 29, was employed as a groom at the time of his marriage. 24-year-old Alice is flatteringly described as a ‘spinster’ and no profession is listed for her.

Neither of them was native to Leeds: William was born in Liverpool and Alice in Tyd St Giles, a farming community in Cambridgeshire near the Norfolk border. I’m often surprised by how much my mostly working class ancestors seem to have moved around the country during their lives. Alice’s father was a labourer and they moved frequently around rural Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, presumably following agricultural work. Three years before she married, in the 1891 census, Alice was living in Leighton in Huntingdonshire as the ‘general servant’ of 70-year-old farmer Benjamin Prior and his wife Elizabeth. I could speculate that she might have moved to Leeds for a service position and met William there.

The Ellis family had moved from Liverpool to Otley by 1881, where William’s father was running a tobacconist’s shop. I haven’t found William in the 1891 census so I can’t fathom what he was doing in young adulthood or how he and Alice might have met. After their marriage William seems to have remained in working class occupations during his lifetime, variously caring for horses and later working as a ‘car washer’ on the Leeds City Tramway. Alice and William had eight children together, of whom seven survived – including my great-grandmother Emily and Joan’s father William.

It’s really thanks to Auntie Joan that I have been able to trace my mum’s family tree. Joan had a phenomenal memory until Alzheimer’s stole it from her, and seemed to know the business of everyone in the family no matter how distantly related they were. Some years ago she wrote me a list of female ancestors together with their maiden names that she’d gathered together from family Bibles belonging to the many cousins she kept in close contact with. Maiden names are gold dust when you’re searching census and BMD records – knowing them short-cuts a lot of uncertainty wading through multiple records of people who might be your ancestors but equally might not. Joan also had a deeply irritating habit of alluding to potential scandal in the family history but then refusing to say any more. I’ll just have to keep searching for that.

There is one tantalising anecdote that came to me via Joan. It relates to Alice’s Boyce’s mother, Sarah Jane Foster, who was born about 1855 in Tyd St Giles, Cambridgeshire and was my great-great-great-grandmother. Joan had an older relative who wrote her the following in a letter:

“I can just remember as a child when we were still living in London visiting Great Grandma Foster who lived at Boston in Lincolnshire. She only had one eye, the other was ruined by a leech which was used to supposedly cure her headaches. I believe leeches were used a lot in those days”.

It’s hard to imagine how grim it must have been to have your sight damaged in that way – particularly given that, far from suing for medical negligence, Sarah Jane would likely have paid some kind of unofficial medical practitioner for the privilege. And she probably still had headaches. There’s obviously nothing in the formal records to indicate that she had this disability – for her, as for the majority of working class lives, there’s only the bare bones of births, marriages, deaths and census records and very little to add colour to ancestors’ lives. Thanks to Auntie Joan, her curiosity and connections, this detail has survived.

On Poverty

When I started my family history research I never expected to find wealth. I knew that both of my parents hailed from working-class families and thought it likely that this would have been the case for my ancestors too. My parents both left school at the age of 15 to learn a trade; my grandparents younger, at 12. Grandad Rushworth told me he was always getting the cane as a child at school because he worked for a butcher and the morning deliveries he had to do meant he was often late. He had little choice; the family needed his income.

Nevertheless, while I expected my ancestors to have worked for a living and perhaps been close to the breadline I hadn’t anticipated the stories of genuine, life-threatening poverty I would turn up. The official records are stark, bald statements of fact but behind them lies a level of suffering I can only imagine.

Last time I talked about my grandad, Leo King, and the discovery that he had become an inmate of Buckley Hall orphanage with two of his brothers when the three of them were (roughly) aged 9, 11 and 13. His mother, Katherine, was still alive at the time, a widow living with older, working children and a younger daughter, so I can only speculate that her husband’s death must have affected the family finances to the point where she could no longer afford to care for everybody and had to make a choice about what to do for the best. I can’t imagine how it must feel to admit you can no longer support your children and what Katherine and her three young sons’ journey to the workhouse must have been like.

I was trying to trace Leo’s younger sister Alice who was five months old on the 1901 census but had disappeared from the available official records by 1911. Alice had a twin brother, John, who went to Buckley Hall with Leo in 1909. I had a suspicion that Alice might have already died by this time, which turns out to have been correct.

Alice Margaret Ellen King was born on 11 October 1900 with her twin brother John. In 1900 it’s unlikely that Katherine would have known she was expecting twins – there were no NHS midwife checkups, no ante-natal scans, none of the high-tech care and information that surrounds modern childbirth. This was Katherine’s seventh, possibly eighth pregnancy and the babies were born at home, at 119 Prince Street, South Manchester. Their father Thomas’s occupation is listed as ‘porter at stock exchange’ – possibly the Royal Exchange in Manchester through which the worldwide trade in Lancashire’s cotton industry was managed.

Manchester Royal Exchange, photographed in 1902. Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, GB127.m56593

Alice was born at 9pm – this is the only birth certificate I have where the time of birth is recorded; I would have to order John’s as well to find out which of the twins was born first. Incidentally this is the only instance I can find of a birth certificate for any of Thomas and Katherine’s children; strange given that civil registration of birth had been a legal obligation for over 70 years.

Alice lived less than a year. She died on the first of September 1901 at the family home, now 10 Spencer Street, also in South Manchester. The family were living there at the time of the 1901 census so must have moved during the first five months of Alice’s life. Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives actually have a photograph of the outhouse behind 10 Spencer Street – it’s hard to see any detail but it appears to be a typical working class terraced house of the time.

The outhouse behind 10 Spencer Street, taken in 1898. Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, GB127.m04605.

The cause of Alice’s death is detailed on the death certificate. She died of “Ricketts & Diarrhoea 6 days, convulsions 1 day”. Her mother Katherine was with her when she died.

Alice’s tragic death aged just 10 months old gives an insight into the family circumstances. Rickets was common in the past and often associated with poverty.  It’s a condition that affects bone development in children, caused by a deficiency of vitamin D and calcium in the diet. According to Wikipedia, “the majority of cases occur in children suffering from severe malnutrition, usually resulting from famine or starvation during the early stages of childhood.”

As a poor woman in the early 20th century Katherine would have had little choice but to breastfeed her children. The challenge of feeding two babies when she might not have been in good health herself might have proved too much and contributed to Alice’s poor health – breastfeeding takes up masses of calories and if Katherine wasn’t well nourished there’s no way her babies would have been.  It’s worth noting that Leo, older than Alice by two years, was small into adulthood: his RAF attestation papers from 1918, when he was 20 years old, give his height as just four feet eleven inches tall. It used to amuse us when my grandma talked about Leo’s height: I’m 5’10” and my brother 6’5″ so we used to joke about what happened to the short genes. Alice’s fate suggests that Leo’s small build was probably not down to nature but nurture, or rather lack of it; caused by poor nutrition in childhood.

The death of a baby from malnutrition just two generations ago seems shocking but is a reminder of how much we now rely on the modern welfare state and National Health Service and the extent to which they have transformed our lives. In Britain in 2016 we have support for people who can’t work through age or illness, financial support for people who are unemployed and health care free at the point of use. If Alice King had been born a century later it’s unlikely that poverty and preventable illness would have taken her life in this way. But campaigners and reformers fought hard for the ‘safety net’ offered by the welfare state and we cannot take any of it for granted.

I didn’t start this blog to be political, but my great-aunt Alice’s story acts as a reminder to be vigilant against those who seek to undermine the welfare state. The Guardian recently reported that diseases of food poverty, such as rickets, are once again on the rise. The current austerity narrative in British politics pushes an ideological position that we can only “balance the books” by cutting back on the amount of support given to people in need. The arguments that poverty is a result of behaviour and that welfare encourages dependency have been around since before the Poor Law despite not being supported by evidence. Many ordinary working people will have ancestors like mine, living just one wage packet away from destitution. Perhaps by understanding more about their lives we can learn to value what we have.

 

 

Trombone Troubles and Trials: adventures in music hall

Leo King in a studio photograph taken to promote his music hall act, probably 1913 – 1918. (c) Emma King.

This is my grandad, Leo King. It was taken sometime in the 1910s in Liverpool when Leo was beginning his career in music hall. Born in 1899 or thereabouts, Leo died in 1956, long before I was born.  I know very little about him as my dad, an only child, was only nine when Leo died and his memories of his father were dim. However, we have a small box of photos and memorabilia that belonged to Leo and for a long time now I’ve been trying to piece together some information about his life.

The most fascinating of Leo’s effects is an autograph book from his music hall days. It’s very tattered and fragile, testament to years of use. The autograph book is mentioned in an obituary of Leo from the Yorkshire Post newspaper in 1956 – apparently he loved to reminisce about his time in the limelight and would show the autograph book to anyone who asked to see it (and, I imagine, probably many who didn’t).  In it there are postcards, drawings, photos and autographs from many of the people he shared the bill with, including a signed photo of Marie Lloyd from July 1914; one from 1918 of George Formby, father of the more famous ukulele-playing namesake; a dedication from the double act Naughton and Gold; and a dedication from Doris Waters, better known as one half of the comedy duo Gert and Daisy.

Signed photo of Marie Lloyd. (c) Emma King.

Signed photo of George Formby Snr. (c) Emma King.

Autographs from G. H. Elliott, Emilie Hayes Elliott and Naughton & Gold. (c) Emma King.

Drawing by C. Rutland, 1918. (c) Emma King.

Drawing by Hugh Hughes. (c) Emma King.

Leo had his own act under the name Leo Ray. According to my grandmother, he played the trombone on roller skates. Grandma was 20 years younger than Leo and married him in the 1940s so would never have seen the act herself, but somewhere we do have a photograph of Leo with a trombone advertising an act called ‘Trombone, Troubles and Trials’. He also had a double act with a female performer. They called themselves ‘Ray and Zack’ and I have no idea what their act involved but from what I’ve gleaned from newspaper reviews, they were typical variety performers of the era. They were also regulars in pantomime. Leo was small – only four feet eleven inches tall, according to his records from the Royal Air Force in 1918 – so I guess was a natural for the role of one of the lost children in ‘Babes in the Wood’.

Studio postcard of Ray & Zack. Image (c) Emma King

I’m gradually trying to piece together a list of Leo’s musical engagements gleaned from the few dated entries in his autograph book and from newspaper reviews via the British Newspaper Archives. The first reviews I can find were from late 1913, when Leo would have been 14 or 15 years old, and the last are from 1918. Leo joined the Royal Air Force in June 1918 and was sent to France to act as a ‘batman’ for one of the officers, which seems to have put an end to his career in music hall as I can’t find any evidence of him continuing after that date. Despite the brevity of his career there are some lovely reviews such as this one from the Manchester Evening News on 24 March 1914:

“The contribution which gives most pleasure to the audience is made by two very young and comparatively unknown performers, styled Ray and Zack. The ranks of the music hall artists have not been reinforced by two more promising performers for many years past. Before they sing a note or dance a step, it is evident from the originality and tastefulness of their costumes that they are no mere tiresome prodigies, and as a matter of fact they are as entertaining as they are quaint, and as joyous as they are versatile”.

I still have many questions about Leo’s music hall life. One is to find the identity of Zack. The most likely candidate seems to be Gertie Zacklin, a  music hall performer from the 1920s and 30s who called herself Ray Zack and married the comedian and producer Tommy Mostol. Gertie was born in about 1900 in Leeds so was a similar age to Leo, though it’s impossible to know how they might have met.  The stage name seems too much of a coincidence, and given that Leo had given up his act by the end of the First World War it’s entirely plausible that his partner from the Ray and Zack double act should have adopted the name. Both Ray Zack and Tommy Mostol sighed Leo’s autograph book in the 1930s.  There is a 1930 sketch featuring Ray Zack and Tommy Mostol on the British Pathe website.

My other burning question was how on earth Leo got started in music hall in the first place. He was born into a military family in Aldershot; in 1901 his father worked in the ordnance stores there and there’s no suggestion that anyone else in the family had musical employment. I’ll explore that question further in my next post.

Military misdemeanours: John Rushworth’s war

It’s been ages since I posted. So long I’ve had to fathom WordPress all over again. The demands of the living have outweighed those of the dead, which I guess is how it should be, but recently I’ve picked back up on the family history trail. I’ve got two more First World War ancestors to talk about before I follow some different stories.

In my last post I talked about my great-grandfather, Edward Rushworth, who served in the Middle East during the First World War then in India in 1919. I’ve also been researching Edward’s brother John. Four years older than Edward, John was born in about 1894 and was living at the family home in the 1911 census, a single man working as a courier’s labourer at the firm of J. W. Stocks in Leeds.

John is so far a rare find among my family in that his wartime service record has survived and made it to the online family history sites. I therefore have a record of his service that takes some of the guesswork out of my research. John attested for the army in May 1913 aged 19 years and 5 months and joined the 1/8th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, known as the Leeds Rifles.  He was still working for J W Stocks, now as a leather finisher. The description on attestation lists him having good vision and good physical development at five feet five inches tall and with a chest measurement of 33 inches – possibly not something that would earn him that description today! He was mobilised to France on 16 April 1915, probably with the 49th (West Riding) division which mobilised on that date and went to France and Flanders, taking part in the Battle of Augers Ridge on 9 May 1915 and in the defence against the first phosgene attack on 19 December. The 49th was involved in phases of the batle of the Somme in 1916 and in a phase of the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917.

At some point John was moved into the 3/5th Battalion which was a reserve and reinforcement battalion, and from there into the Labour Corps. It seems likely that these moves could have been due to wounds or sickness, though his disability form – which is undated but contains his Labour Corps details – states that he was not suffering from a disability caused by his military service. I do have a record of him being hospitalised in June 1915, after two months with the field force, though this was due to an eye complaint rather than for any military cause. The record, on the Forces War Records website, notes that John had “Compound myopic astigmatism right eye. Defective eyesight none due to any war cause other than fatigue”. He spent a week in hospital then was discharged back to duty.  John would have seen his first major action a month earlier at the Battle of Aubers, where the 49th Division got off lightly with only 94 casualties. It’s tempting to speculate whether his eye condition might have been related to the shock of war.

John’s service record is relatively innocuous apart from one incident on his conduct sheet dated November 1917. The record describes the offence: “whilst employed at C.T.S.C., taking a tin of Maconochie rations from a crate without permission”. According to the Imperial War Museum this watery tinned stew was “more blamed than praised and many considered it only edible if mixed with something else”.

Tin of Maconachie ration, First World War. (c) IWM (EPH 4379).

The offence was witnessed by a Lance Corporal Chapman M.F.P and earned John two weeks of Field Punishment No. 2. This would have involved him being shackled or restrained and doing extra duties – a military historian friend told me it may have involved pack drill, being made to walk around a track for hours fully laden with equipment. Either way it sounds like a serious punishment and a lot to go through for a tin of watery stew! I hope he at least managed to eat it.

John survived the war and received the 1914-15 Star, the Victory Medal and the British War Medal. He died in 1973 aged 79.

There was another brother in between John and Edward whose war record I have yet to trace. Charles Haydon Rushworth will have been about 19 when war broke out in 1914, so was definitely the right age to have been conscripted in 1916, but I haven’t been able to find him in the military records. There are numerous Charles Rushworths on the medal rolls but without an address, regimental number or some other form of identifier I can’t pin mine down. He married Mary Ann Davidson at St Matthew’s Church in Leeds in March 1918 when his profession is listed as ‘Bookbinder’, so he had remained in the leather trade but moved on from his days as an errand boy (interestingly his name is spelt, and signed, ‘Charles Aden’ not Charles Haydon as it appears on the 1911 census form signed by his father). Bookbinding was surely not the kind of profession that would lead to someone being exempted from military service, so it’s possible to speculate that Charles had served and been discharged perhaps due to ill health or wounds.  Perhaps this also enabled him to train for a skilled occupation in the leather trade rather than a labouring job. There was a Charles Rushworth discharged from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry due to wounds in 1915 after serving overseas but I’ve no way of knowing whether it’s the same one. Given that two of Charles’s brothers volunteered, his father served at home in the Volunteer Force and his father-in-law was a soldier,  one imagines there might have been a certain amount of family pressure for Charles  to do his duty and there must be an explanation for him being in a civilian occupation, living in the family home, aged 22 in 1918. Another puzzle to solve!

The Rushworths in the First World War

Today I’m staying with the First World War but heading over to the other side of the family. My mum is a Rushworth and I’ve been looking into the experiences of my great-grandfather Edward Rushworth, born in 1898, and those of his brothers who served during the war.

Edward was the third of eight children born to Charles Rushworth and his wife Mary Ann, nee Green. Charles worked in the leather trade: in 1911 he was a tanner and leather currier at the firm of J.W. Stocks in Leeds where his eldest son John, aged 17, also worked as a labourer.  Two other sons, Charles Haydon and my great-grandfather Edward, worked as errand boys in the leather trade.  The family were from Leeds and lived there in 1911 but seem to have moved around a lot, spending a few years in Northampton at the beginning of the century. They can’t have been well off: tanning was a notoriously unhealthy industry and according to the census return, in 1911 the ten of them were living in three rooms.  They lived at no. 6 Gresham Street which was derelict by the 1950s, as seen in this photograph on the Leodis website, and was included in the slum clearance programme in the early 1960s.

I thought that Edward Rushworth would probably have served in the First World War due to his age: he would have been 18 in 1916 just as the National Conscription Act made military service compulsory for single men aged between 19 and 41.  I found proof that Edward had served on his marriage certificate. He married Emily Ellis on 24 May 1919 and was still in the Army at that time: under ‘rank or profession’ his marriage certificate states ‘Private No 82975 M.G.C. (Boot Operator).

Unfortunately, as with many of those who served during the First World War, Edward’s official Army records don’t seem to have survived.  His medal index card shows that he was entitled to the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, but I couldn’t find anything in the online family history sites to add to that.

My main sources of information for his war service are an entry in the National Roll of the Great War cut from a newspaper by someone in the family years ago, and family memories. I’m very grateful to whoever decided to cut this clipping from the newspaper presumably in the early 1920s.

I know it refers to the right Edward Rushworth as it gives his address, which is the same as that on my great-grandfather’s marriage certificate from 1919. I had imagined he might have been conscripted in 1916 but the clipping shows he actually volunteered a year earlier, when he was possibly only 17, though why he would have joined the Durham Light Infantry rather than a local Leeds regiment is something I have yet to explain.  He served in the Middle East during the war – something else I need to research further. It also shows he stayed in the army after the war’s end and served in India, probably in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, though he must have come home on leave in May 1919 as that’s when he married Emily.

I was able to flesh out Edward’s story a little bit by talking to my uncle. Born in 1940, he and my grandma lived with Edward and Emily during the Second World War while my grandad was away. My uncle remembers Edward talking about his time as a Lewis gunner during the First World War.  Edward had apparently talked about using guns cooled by water which got so hot that the water boiled and they could use it to make tea.  In this instance he must have been talking about the Vickers, which was a water cooled gun used by the Machine Gun Corps (the Lewis gun was lighter,  air cooled and was issued to infantry units because it could be carried and used by one soldier) though Edward probably used both.  This photo from the Imperial War Museum collection shows a Vickers machine gun crew in action during the Battle of Menin Road Ridge in September 1917.

A Vickers machine gun crew in action. (c) IWM (Q2864).

Edward also talked about being at the Khyber Pass, which must have been during the Third Afghan War in 1919 (more on that from the National Army Museum here). My favourite anecdote, however, is about Edward’s tattoo. My uncle remembers him having a huge tattoo of a cross on his chest, big enough to stretch from neck to waistband. Edward said he got the tattoo in India but couldn’t remember how – he just woke up one morning and there it was.  That must have been an impressive night out.  I imagine there are squaddies still having similar experiences today.

In later life Edward was apparently a round, jolly man who liked a drink. The photos we have of him certainly fit that description. He died in March 1972.

Register of Soldiers’ Effects

Last time I wrote about my great-uncle Fred King who was killed during the First World War. One of the more moving aspects of Fred’s story for me is the response of his family, particularly his mother Katherine, to his death.  We know nothing of her private grief, but she did include information about his family in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission register. Families had to pay to include this information and Fred’s mother, who was widowed and not well off, included information about his family. She also commissioned the words ‘Ever Remembered’ on his headstone.

In my grandfather Leo’s papers we have an autograph book containing entries from June 1918 when Leo was conscripted into the RAF. Among them are a number of messages and poems from his mother.

When I first read this I didn’t know that Leo’s older brother had been killed a year earlier. At the time I thought the messages were sentimental; now I know the circumstances I find them very moving.

Recently the genealogy website Ancestry.com released some new First World War records: the UK Army Register of Soldiers’ Effects. This documents the money owed to soldiers serving in the British Army who died between 1901 and 1929.  The records list the soldier’s name, rank, battalion and his date of death, plus his next of kin and who the money was owed to.

When I searched for Fred’s record I was expecting to find that his effects had gone to his mother Katherine. Fred had been married, but his listing on the CWGC website indicated that his wife Emily had died before him. I had imagined that, because Emily was dead, Fred’s mother would now be his next of kin. However, the record doesn’t show that. Fred’s ‘wife and sole legatee’ Emily is indeed noted as ‘deceased’, but instead of Katherine receiving Fred’s effects the grantee was listed as ‘Herbert Westerby Tate’, who I know from the census was Emily’s brother. If I’ve read the record correctly, Herbert received the sum of £11 and 10 shillings. I wonder if he also received the ‘death penny’ sent to bereaved families, and Fred’s war medals.

I wonder what Katherine made of this. I can’t even guess at her relationship with her son’s brother-in-law.  In the 1911 census Herbert was 32, worked as a tailor’s machinist and lived with his widowed mother, as did Emily and their younger sister Eleanor.  In August of that year he married Annie Fenton at the Oxford Place Methodist Chapel in Leeds.  Emily was a witness at their wedding.

Perhaps Herbert contributed to the cost of Fred’s CWGC listing. Maybe he helped Katherine out if she was still in financial difficulty (the family were not well off, which I’ll explain in a separate post). It’s impossible to know.

Finding Fred: tracing my First World War family

There’s a letter in my family that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. It lives among my grandad’s papers, which are a disparate collection of fading photographs, scribbled notes and official documents, together with what was his pride and joy: an autograph book from his days as a music hall artist in the years before and during the First World War. My grandad Leo King was born in 1899 (or ’98, depending on which source you believe!) and died aged 56 when my dad was just nine years old. An only child, Dad had limited memories of his father and there were no aunts and uncles to tell him about Leo when he was young.

Among Leo’s papers is a leather wallet with his name and address written on it, containing a single, folded document. The letter is written in pencil on two sheets of lined paper, secured with a metal staple.  The top line reads ‘2705 Sgt F W King RFA’ with an address in France.  Frustratingly, the date is unclear. The letter begins, ‘Dear Pudge’. We know it was written to Leo because there are references to his music hall career among the casual references to ‘Zepps’ and chat of mutual friends. It’s signed ‘Fred’ and there’s a lovely page of doodles which Fred notes as ‘The result of a few minutes waste time’.  Fred evidently wrote his letter from the Western Front during the First World War.

As a lifelong history fanatic I’ve always wanted to know more. I began tracing my family history eleven years ago when my dad became terminally ill and the lifelong mystery of his father’s family became more important to him. I found Leo’s family on the census each year from 1891 to 1911 but there was no sign of anyone called Fred, and I had no age or further information about him to go on. Leo’s parents seem to have got away with not registering the births of any of their children, something I’ve never managed to work out. I eventually concluded that the elusive letter-writer must have been Leo’s uncle. Given that Leo’s father Thomas King had been born in Ireland and I couldn’t find him in any official documents before his marriage in England in the 1880s, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding Fred. More frustrating, searches for various combinations of 2705 and F King in the military records on the major family history websites turned up nothing – not even a medal index card. Other than the letter, Sergeant F W King seemed to have vanished without trace.  I turned my attention to less evasive branches of the family tree, though Fred always lingered at the back of my mind.

It would be hard to escape the fact that 2014 marked the centenary of the start of the First World War. I’m working on several First World War related projects and researching individuals’ stories using sites like Ancestry and FindMyPast.  I was finally prompted into action by the launch of the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War website, a permanent digital memorial to those who served in the conflict created through crowdsourced research. With an opportunity not just to look for Fred but to create a permanent record of his story, I decided to renew my search.

The breakthrough came when I went back to Leo’s papers and found a small photograph album I hadn’t paid attention to before. The dozen or so photos appear to be from the 1920s or thereabouts and document a trip to the continent. Among them is an image of a single gravestone. It’s too faded to read the inscription on the headstone, but underneath someone has written a caption: ‘At Bailleul sire Berthol, France’.

This was the lead I needed. Ten minutes later I was looking at an entry for Sergeant Fred W. King on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission web page for Albuera Cemetery at Bailleul-sire-Berthoult. The regimental number was different to that on the letter but I knew immediately that this was my Fred – his parents’ names and address are familiar to me from tracing Leo’s family tree, and he was born in Aldershot, the same as Leo. Fred was Leo’s older brother and my dad’s uncle. He served with the Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action aged 30 on 22nd April 1917.

The entry has helped me solve further mysteries. I finally found Fred on the census for 1891. He wasn’t in the family home when the census was taken but was next door, with grandparents, and the census enumerater gave him the wrong surname. In 1901 he was still in his grandparents’ household but is now listed as Fred King. I was also able to trace Fred’s marriage to Emily Tate in 1915.  There’s a hidden tragedy here as Emily had already died by the time Fred was killed less than two years after their wedding. On her marriage certificate she is listed as ‘Trade Union organiser’. A lifelong union man, my dad would have loved that.

I’m gradually adding Fred’s story to his entry on Lives of the First World War.  It’s fantastic to be able to contribute to a national project to remember the thousands of individual lives affected by the conflict.  From the detail in Fred’s CWGC entry I’ve been able to find the regimental diary for his unit on the National Archives website which contains a compelling, detailed description of the situation in the days leading up to his death.  Thanks to the fantastic War Graves Photographic Project I’ve also been able to find a recent photograph of his grave, which they’ve given me permission to reproduce here.

Fred’s headstone reads ‘Ever Remembered’. I’d like to think I’ve played a small part in keeping his memory alive.