Uncover your familys military roots

Researching a family's military history used to be a real challenge, but as more and more paper archives go digital and are transferred to the internet, it's becoming possible for anyone to leaf out a family tree in surprising detail by using a few tricks and knowing where to look.
"The biggest thing that's changed is the ability to find digitized documents through simple things like Google and search tools specific to military family histories," says Alex Herd, lead researcher for the Historica-Dominion Institute Memory Project in Toronto that aims to increase the public's knowledge of Canadian history.
"There almost seems to be some prestige involved with finding an ancestor who served in the military and particularly in any wars, and a lot of information that was difficult to get before has become available," adds Jeannine Powell of Duncan, B.C. Her day job is with a secretarial company, but an "18-year obsession" with genealogy has made her an expert (her nickname is GenQueen, a play on her name), and she's involved with groups ranging from Genealogy Helplist Canada, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' Family History Centre, to an array of historical websites.
"Two of the highest things people use the internet [to search] for are pornography and family ancestry. One will tear a family apart, the other will build it up," she says with a laugh.

There's a growing collection of personal military minutiae available through paid websites that cater to people researching their family trees.
One of the biggest subscription sites is Ancestry.com, which has been adding databases and buying up other genealogy portals such as Footnote.com (which it renamed Fold3.com and gave an even stronger military focus). The monthly charge for Ancestry.ca, its Canadian portal, starts at $10 and the archival collections for Canada and other countries include burial and war grave registers, records of war dead, copies of attestation papers, and lists of deserters, dischargees and POWs.
"Ancestry.ca is the first and No. 1 thing that a lot of people have been using for this kind of research," says Herd.
Paid sites generally have extensive records that are slickly organized and easy to use.
"Ancestry.ca does much of the searching for you and will automatically use what you enter in your tree to search the billions of historical records in its database for likely matches," says Ancestry.ca genealogist Lesley Anderson.
"We have a number of [types of] military content available to users at ancestry.ca/remember," she said, adding that the online records are available to the public for free until Nov. 13 in honour of Remembrance Day.
Besides their centralized search capabilities, subscription-based sites also offer access to some material that isn't readily available elsewhere.
"In terms of World War II, for example, it's just recently that more records have started to become available, and many of those are on the big commercial websites," Powell says.
But paid sites aren't the only research option, and they only contain a portion of the information that's available. There's an enormous amount of information published free through government and educational sites, and shared by genealogy hobbyists.
Library and Archives Canada and other government and educational agencies are steadily digitizing their free paper records, Herd says, and they date back to conflicts such as the War of 1812 and the rebellions of 1837 and 1885. "In the last few years they've become an important link for family members interested in finding veterans in their broader family tree."

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Uncover your familys military roots

Imperial War Museum commemorates Armistice Day by releasing photos of WWI dead

Private Tickle, Captain Percy Ernest Bass, Private Thomas Newton. The fading names we read on war memorials are by turns familiar, distant or even comical, but it’s sometimes hard to picture the real people that lie behind these poignant reminders of the First World War.

Now the Imperial War Museum has launched a new initiative through the social networking and photo sharing site Flickr, aiming to put faces to some of these names.

To mark Armistice Day 11.11.11, and the coming centenary of the Great War's outbreak in 1914, the IWM has made 100 portraits of people who served available through their Faces of the First World War project on Flickr Commons.

The photographs were acquired by the museum betwenn 1917 and 1920 as part of its mission to record experiences of the war and offer a personal and poignant record of its impact.

In some cases bereaved families donated their only photograph. Some of them have only a name, rank and unit - others are accompanied by detailed letters and biographies. Britain and the Commonwealth are represented, as are the range of military ranks and services.

More portraits with biographical details will be added to the site every weekday until August 2014, the 100th anniversary of the war's outbreak.

The aim is to help the public discover the life stories of the people in the photographs by adding comments, information, links or text to the photos. It is hoped people may find an ancestor or make a connection to a name on a local war memorial or from a local regiment.

"The First World War Centenary is a landmark anniversary for Britain and the world," says IWM Director General Diane Lees. "The war was a turning point in world history. It claimed the lives of more than 16 million people across the globe and affected the lives of millions more."

Lees says that, despite the intervening century, everybody in the world "still has a connection" to the First World War, "either through their own family history, links to their local community or because of its long term impact on the world we live in today."

Faces of the First World War is part of IWM’s preparations to mark the First World War Centenary in 2014-2018 by leading an ambitious four-year programme of cultural activities across the country, including the opening of brand new First World War galleries at IWM London in 2014. See more at www.1914.org
By Richard Moss

http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/war+%26+conflict/world+war+one/art367976

Imperial War Museum commemorates Armistice Day by releasing photos of WWI dead

Help heroic Pals march into history

TOWNSFOLK are being invited to join a trailblazing local history project backed by lottery cash to help highlight the sacrifices and stories of relatives who fought in the First World War.
The St Helens Townships Family History Society has been awarded a £40,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to research the history of the heroic St Helens Pals.
Pals battalions were special units of the British Army for men who had enlisted together in local recruiting drives - with the promise of serving alongside their friends instead of being sent to serve in regular army regiments.
The name St Helens Pals tended to be applied to all men from St Helens who fought in the army, but the project will concentrate on the 11th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment - raised by Lord Derby - which became known as The St Helens Pals.
The research is being led by military historians Dave Risley and Richard Waring, but it is local people who will hold the key to unearthing much of the material.
Local historian and Project Manager, Peter Harvey explained: Everyone can take part - by finding out about members of their family who served in the First World War.
Anyone who has any papers, information, photographs or a family story can go along to the Archive Library in the Gamble Building, Victoria Square, where we will set up a contact register for people to be involved throughout this exciting project.”
The grant award was helped with advice from experts at St Helens Council.

Help heroic Pals march into history

Unclaimed portraits of lost Diggers sent home

HUNDREDS of unclaimed portraits of World War I Diggers taken in London before they left to fight on the Western Front will be added to the National Archives collection today.
The 500 black and white portraits were found among 1600 photographs of Allied soldiers collected by the Imperial War Museum, London, after the war. The 500 are significant because they are not known to exist anywhere else, mainly because soldiers never returned from battle to collect them.
The Department of Veterans' Affairs historical researcher Courtney Page-Allen said the studio portraits were valuable because they were about the individual. ''The most important thing is that it reminds you that every one of these men was a real man with a life and a family,'' she said.

''Over the years I have seen literally millions of photographs from public and private collections. But these are different. They are not photos taken in the trenches or on the frontline where the story was the battle. These are about the individual.''
In contrast, Ms Page-Allen pointed to servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan who are remembered as individuals - mainly possible because modern-day fatalities are comparatively low. But this was not possible during the First World War because the numbers were so overwhelming.
Among the portraits is Ballarat engineer William Robert Allen, who was killed in France in February 1917, six months after being promoted to lieutenant.

Also found was a photograph of Queensland farmer Irvine Barton, who was 19 when he joined the Second Lighthorse Regiment in 1914.
He died in France of wounds in April 1918 after being awarded the military cross for his ''coolness, dash and military judgment of the highest order'' a month earlier.
According to a report in the London Gazette, he was on patrol behind enemy lines when he allowed eight German soldiers to come within a few feet of his concealed position. After calling on the enemy to surrender, Barton was wounded in the gunfight. Within a month he had returned to the frontline, where he was fatally shot.


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Unclaimed portraits of lost Diggers sent home

Logging on to town’s history

Twelve year old Joshua Fawcett who has created his own online Scarborough history page. 114306a. Picture Kevin Allen. 24/10/11.

Published on Sunday 30 October 2011 09:00

A SCARBOROUGH school boy with a passion for history has created his own web page about Scarborough’s past.

Twelve year old Joshua Fawcett has set up a page on social networking site Facebook, where he collects and displays old pictures and stories about Scarborough.
The page, entitled Old Scarborough Photo Archive, has 444 ‘likes’ which is the amount of people who regularly log on.
Joshua, who has aspergers syndrome, is now appealing for more old photos of the town to add to his collection.
He said: “I started the page because I was researching my family history and enjoyed finding out about history. I thought it would be good to find out more about the history of Scarborough too, and the different areas.
“It has really gone well, and I have got quite a few people viewing it which is good.
“I’m always looking for more photos to add to it, and I’m hoping to start one on Filey, and different areas around Scarborough too.”
Joshua’s mother Natalie Fawcett is delighted with her son’s hobby.
She said; “I am just really proud of him and what he has done, especially considering he is only 12 and he has aspergers.
“He has a genuine love of history, and it is wonderful to see him doing something productive with his time, when most boys his age just use computers to play games.
“I am so pleased for him that the page is so popular. People are always commenting on his photos and sharing their own experiences and memories.”
If you would like to donate any pictures to Joshua for his page you can contact him via his facebook page, which is Old Scarborough Photo Archive.


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Logging on to town’s history

Harold Pinter's forgotten sketch rediscovered after more than 50 years

Surprise find at British Library is the script of 'Umbrellas', part of a 1960 revue performed only once at the Nottingham Playhouse

Harold Pinter in the 1960s. Photograph: Hulton Archive

It was part of a 1960 revue at the Nottingham Playhouse called You, Me and the Gatepost, performed for one night only, and then promptly forgotten.
But the sketch, written by a 29-year-old Harold Pinter and lost for more than half a century, has re-emerged as a result of some diligent detective work and is published by the Guardian for the first time and in full.
The sketch, set on the sunbathed terrace of a large hotel and called Umbrellas, is very Pinter, and if there was any doubt who the author was, then the 12 designated pauses are something of a giveaway.
Pinter's widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, said she had been "completely unaware" of the existence of Umbrellas. "It's fun. We've all been quarrelling over acting it in the family. I want to act B, which is the better part, but so far I've only managed to act A, so we're waiting for some really good actors to do it."
The sketch was discovered by Ian Greaves, who works on the archive of the absurdist playwright NF Simpson. Simpson contributed to You, Me and the Gatepost.
Jamie Andrews, head of English and drama at the British Library, said once it was known the revue had been staged, the scripts had to be somewhere in the collections because every script was submitted to censors at the lord chamberlain's office – and the library holds them all.
The scripts were duly found and, to the amazement of everyone involved, there was Umbrellas, among 25 sketches performed that night. Greaves recalls feeling "astonishment. And wanting to get home and check every book I had on Pinter to try to get to the bottom of it. It is extraordinary that things like this can crop up." While archivists do not think there are many more Pinter surprises in the British Library, they are fairly sure more may emerge about other writers from the archive of something like 56,000 20th-century scripts submitted to the lord chamberlain's office, which finally lost its vetting role in 1968.
The sketch was performed in a good year for the young Pinter, with A Night Out getting a huge ITV audience in the Armchair Theatre slot while The Caretaker was taking the West End by storm. Quite why the revue in Nottingham got hardly any coverage is another question – although the London-centrism of national newspaper critics is as good a reason as any.
"It seems peculiar and incredible that a work by the West End's 'triumph' Harold Pinter was just passed by," said Greaves.
The scripts come with a short "reader's report" by someone called CD Heriot which recommends that the revue is allowed to go ahead without cuts. The report calls it "an excellent revue containing the best of all the fashionable 'off-beat' writers" – people such as Pinter, John Mortimer, Ann Jellicoe and Shelagh Delaney.
The sketch's existence was revealed as the theatre with which Pinter was most closely associated, the 130-year-old Comedy theatre, was officially renamed the Harold Pinter theatre. Fraser said she burst into tears when she heard of the plan at the end of the recent run of Pinter's Betrayal. "It is an extremely moving day for me. Harold would have been completely thrilled, there's no question at all about that."
Fittingly, the first play to be staged in the newly renamed theatre is Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, starring Thandie Newton, which had its first night on Monday night. Dorfman said Pinter was the play's mentor, using his influence to get it performed at the Royal Court after seeing a read-through at the ICA in 1990.


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Harold Pinter's forgotten sketch rediscovered after more than 50 years

Old Somerset photos need new light

Western Daily Press

This evocative photograph of an ice-cream seller and his faithful horse parked up and ready for business may stir distant memories for some readers.
The image has been printed from a glass negative, one of a number which have been saved from oblivion by retired farmer Horace Willcox, who acquired them from a dealer from near Glastonbury.

The Ice Cream Man, one of Horace Willcox's photographic glass plates

Mr Willcox received the box of old negatives as a thank you from a general dealer who stored goods at his farm at Westhay, near Glastonbury, some years ago. He has always wondered where they were taken and to whom they belonged. One shows three little girls, undoubtedly sisters from their similarity, possibly taken in the 1930s. Another shows a boy wearing button-up boots, a suit and bow tie, which may be 20 years older.
They were precious mementoes to some family, but was the ice-cream seller a friend, a relation, or simply a stranger whom the photogapher thought made an interesting image.
Captured in time he is the star of the show.Mr Willcox would like to hear from any reader who can throw light on the photographs.

If you have information email Tina Rowe at t.rowe@bepp.co.uk

Old Somerset photos need new light