A New Venture

 
Battlefields 2016 should have simply been a school trip like any other. And indeed it was: a coach full of forty one excited students, five enthusiastic teachers and a ferry to Calais.

We had three extremely informative albeit emotional days visiting the battlefields and cemeteries of Northern France and Belgium. At times, students and staff left utterly speechless at the scale of destruction that the First World War left in its wake: 56,000 names on the Menin Gate; 72,195 names on the Thiepval Memorial to the missing of the Somme and thousands lost, literally, in the mud.

So many dead in the cemeteries left without a name and 'known unto God'. So many stories; the girls and staff discussing their own family's experiences of this conflict and searching for their own surnames among the countless lists of war dead.

And so, I was left reflecting on my own family's stories of the First World War. Uncle David, who died of gangrene aged 26 at Rouen in 1915; Uncle Stan who was gassed and died barely a few years after the war ended and Herbert, my own grandfather, who played football for his regiment but was so deeply traumatized by his experiences that he would not ever speak of them. Even my husband's own great grandfather, Ambrose, came all the way from Canada to fight for the motherland and was left with chronic lung disease following a gas attack.

I was standing on Vimy Ridge only yesterday, thinking, 'was Ambrose here? Am I standing on soil once trodden by my husband's great grandfather? Is this his Great War? Or was he at Thiepval or Paschendale?' I simply didn't know.

 
And despite valuable nuggets of information passed down from elderly (and in many cases, now deceased) grandparents, I realised that I have no idea where the Leicestershire Regiment fought so that Uncle David got his legs shot off. Or where Stan or Ambrose got blinded.  And why I have a photo of great grandad Herbert in an inter-regimental football team, with other soldiers from Yorkshire, Scotland and Essex.

And so on the laborious journey back in the coach, I decided that I wanted to look into these things in more detail and share it on this blog. I've always had a very avid interest in genealogy since my early teens and have a rather comprehensive family tree now. I have a good sense of the people in it. They're like characters in a favourite novel. However, some of them feel a little one dimensional and I hope through further research and reading I might breathe some life into them.

 

And finally, the Green Fields of France has always been a favourite song of mine. It's lyrics include:

"Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enshrined forever behind a glass frame
In an old photograph torn battered and stained
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame."

I hope over the coming months, I can give back not only some names but also some sense of the people behind them. After all, we all come from somewhere.

Though this is not exclusively a First World War genealogy blog, with my recent trip, I think it is a good place for me to start.