Another shock horror ancestry secret unveiled

[Toshiba Boy]

My Great Uncle (Dad's Dad's Brother), was a 19 year old conscript in WWI. Never been outside Birmingham before, sailed to France Boxing Day 1916, killed (no body found) on 6th March 1917 on the Somme, in what his Battalion records note as a "successful" skirmish towards the German lines, with "only" 44 fatalities from the 600 men.

On the 100th anniversary, myself, my wife, sister, sister in law and cousin, were stood in the shallow depression that marked the trench line from where the Battalion walked (as you do into the teeth of machine gun and rifle fire) up a slope (unsurprisingly, the Germans held the high ground). Placed a cross and poppy to him on the lip of the depression, his middle name (and obviously surname) the same as my name .... I am not ashamed to say I had tears rolling down my face when I wrote our respective names on it.

RIP Great Uncle Joseph (and your 43 colleagues and any poor scared witless German kid who also died).

 

[Ming the Merciless]

I found out my ancestors lived in the past. Quite a shock really.

 

[Mr Celine]

Oh and a very distant relative was one of the British knights with Henry V at Agincourt.

British knights? Which side were they on?

 

[Joey Shabadoo]

Sort of tangentially - I once worked in a charity shop on Arran and I noticed an old Asian woman coming in a few days in a row. Just wandering around, looking at stuff then leaving. I didn't know if she was Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese or whatever but when she came in the next week I used one of only three Japanese words I know and greeted her with "Konichiwa". Her face lit up like the sun had come up and she pulled out a Japanese/English phrasebook and we had a (very stunted) conversation. Her grandsons were on Arran investigating opening a restaurant and she was left to her own devices. It was a long time ago now but I remember her saying she was a young girl at Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped, working in an apple orchard in the hills outside the city. At this she looked upward and spread out her arms, her fingers fluttering as she described the radioactive ash falling like apple blossom all around her. It was such a vivid description and it's stayed with me to this day.

 

[colly]

Mrs Colly has done a good bit of family history. It seems my line springs from around Breslaw (now the Polish city of Wroclaw) which stands appox. 200km to the east of Dresden and is north east of Prague and south east of Berlin. My direct ancestor joined The Duke of Brunswick Light Infantry around 1797 at age 23 and was discharged for health reasons (possibly yellow fever) in September 1814, at Lymington. At the time of discharge his trade was described as 'surgeon'. Having married an English girl two years previously he settled in south London.
Mrs Colly's line she has traced back further into the 1500's and one of her ancestors a John Edmund Cooper had a daughter Agnes.(9th Great Grand Aunt ) Agnes, married an Edward Tilley in 1614
Agnes and her husband Edward were protestants and initially settled in Leiden in South Holland. They subsequently returned and set sail for the New World aboard a little ship called The Mayflower in 1620.