I started doing this research in 1994. Since then I
have visited countless archives, libraries, cemeteries, and
battlefields (see sources
for details of where I've looked). I have also visited representatives
of many of the families and all of this has led to a lot of background
information and some kind of biographical detail for all of the men in
the photograph. My collection of photographs is also expanding, with,
in one case, pictures of one man at all stages of life, from being a
young boy with curls and Victorian robe up to being ten feet up a
ladder doing some pruning at the age of 90. To give you an idea of how
I'm getting on, this page is broken up into the following sections:
Statistics
- Births
- I have got the exact birth dates for all 50. The
average age at the time of the photograph was 26
, with the youngest being 18 and the oldest being 50.
- Marriages
- 22 of the men never married, 26 married once, and
2 married twice.
- Children
- 21 of the men had children and 29 did not.
- Deaths
- I have got the exact death dates for all 50. The
average age at death was 47, with the youngest being 18 and the oldest
being 94.
- My contacts with the families
- I have made contact with relatives of all 50 men -
and have visited members of 39 families.
- Family trees
- I have built the complete family trees of the
descendants of all of these men (correct to the beginning on the year
2000). The total number of direct descendants that I currently now of
stands at 230 (43 children, 69 grandchildren, 99 great-grandchildren,
19 great-great-grandchildren).
- Website
- since my site went up in June 1998, I have had
thousands of visits (difficult to quantify because the web statistics
are combined between my various websites).
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Highlights
Over the years I have met a lot of people and been to a
lot of places and there have been many highlights, ranging from the
archive 'aha's where I have discovered a vital piece in the puzzle
after many hours searching, to the kindness and enthusiasm of people I
have met, to the awe at finding vast personal archives relating to
these men. These are just the tip of the ice continent:
- In 1999, I was invited out to South Africa by the
Berlein family and visited representatives of three generations of the
family in the Transvaal, Natal and Cape Town. The day that will always
stay in mind was when I opened and looked through the trunks that had
belonged to the two Berlein brothers who had been killed in the war. I
was deeply affected by this experience. The trunks were time-capsules
full of memories still as fresh as when the contents were first
collected. Particularly poignant were the mementoes that they had kept
to remind them of the good times, the trinkets and fun photographs and
scores of dance cards (all marked up using their attached pencils). I
was also amazed to find a letter from my Great Uncle Billy, aged 12,
writing to Leslie in the trenches in August 1915. Although not much is
known in detail about the two brothers as people, their loss is still
very much remembered in the family - in fact the wooden crosses that
originally marked their graves in France now stand side by side in the
Berleins' garden, looking out across an African valley.
- The day after I returned from South Africa I
received an email from a man who has got my great-grandfather's medals.
Although we've got his miniatures in a case on the wall, we did not
know what had happened to the original medals and had given them up as
lost for good. The current owner's filing system has let him down, but
he thinks he bought them at auction in the early 1990s. It'll be
interesting to see if we can work out how they came to be on the
market.
- I discovered a treasure-trove in an attic in
Wimbledon relating to James Barrow's family. They had been left to a
family friend and forgotten about for 10 years. Amongst this hoard of
photographs and postcards were: a coloured and gold-bordered Reward of
Merit certificate that James Barrow was awarded in 1879 for arithmetic,
punctuality, diligence, and good conduct when aged 10; eleven sides of
foolscap written in his own hand describing a three-day holiday to the
Isle of Man in 1886 at the age of 17; and enough information about the
family so that when I visited the church he was married in in
Lancashire I could identify the graves of his parents, his sister, his
brother and sister-in-law, his parents-in-law, his brother-in-law and
another sister-in-law, and one of his friends with whom he went to the
Isle of Man.
- In our own loft, I keep making amazing discoveries.
There have been a number of hoarders in my family, but unfortunately
this talent for holding onto vast amounts of stuff has not been
accompanied by an enthusiasm for cataloguing and filing. So whilst I
did find a lot of relevant letters and photographs at the beginning of
this project, it was not until five years in that I came across my
great-grandfather's Indian Army service record (which I had already
spent some time looking for in the Oriental and Indian Office
Collection of the British Library) as well as some more letters,
various messages from dispatch pads, and a very interesting letter
written to my great-grandfather by Major Bartlett, a week after their
having gone into action at Loos (my great-grandfather having left for
his posting in Aden). And then, towards the end of last year, I found
an original print of the group photograph (which is a story in itself).
- In June 2000 I met the grand-daughter of Major
Bartlett and she loaned me 341 letters written
between August 1915 and March 1917. Most were written by her
grandfather, but in amongst them were a couple written by my
great-grandfather just after the Battle of Loos. There were also a few
small photos, including one showing my Gran with her sister and
brother. The letters really were the most marvellous find. As well as
giving a view of Major Bartlett's character and of his relationship
with his wife, they are very evocative of the period. It was also
interesting to get another angle on incidents that I have seen reported
in other sources and there are many mentions of other men in the
photograph.
- During my trip to Canada in the summer of 2000 I met
two sons, one grandson, one grand-daughter, and four nieces of various
of the men in the photograph. In terms of artefacts, the most important
finds were Peter McGibbon's massive Smith & Wesson revolver and
an album of photographs taken by Charlie Watson whilst he was
undergoing training in 1915.
- I met George Strong, a 101-year-old survivor of the
8th Royal Berkshire's attack at Loos, and heard his clear recollections
of my great-grandfather.
- I have found the actual field where the photograph
was taken and even managed to take a photograph from what must be
nearly the exact same spot despite the close attentions of a herd of
young bullocks.
- The relatives that I have found have included one of
the foremost mathematicians in America, a movie-camera engineer who won
five Oscars, a man who survived two convoys to Murmansk as well as a
convoy to Malta in which his ship was sunk and was a landing craft
commander for 7 opposed landings in the Mediterranean in the Second
World War a British Ambassador to Bulgaria, Ernest Hemingway's pilot
(as mentioned in Michael Palin's book), an orchestrator and arranger of
scores for over 150 films (including most recently Bridget Jones's
Diary), Pugh the cartoonist on the front page of 'The Times',
and a man who survived the Paddington rail disaster in 1999.
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The Marvel of the Internet
I was making progress with my project before I started
using the Internet, but I now realise that my task would have been near
nigh impossible without it. Many of the families connected to this
photograph are spread around the globe and tracking them down would
have been a lifetime's work without the immediacy and connectivity of
the Internet. Having a website that can be searched from anywhere in
the world has brought people to contact me who I would never have found
otherwise. This started on Day One - I uploaded my website one night
and advertised it on one of the genealogy newsgroups, and in the
morning when I checked my mailbox, I had an email from a man in Austin,
Texas, who had the family tree of one of the men in the photograph
going back to the 11 th Century. I have also
had contacts with relatives of the men in the photograph. Amongst these
have been one that led to my trip out to South Africa, another was from
the grandchildren of Donald Stileman (who got in touch without
realising that I had already met their parents) and another enabled me
to put two second-cousins in touch with each other. I also received a
request to write an article for the Berkshire Family Historian magazine
which led to contact with another of the families.
A great surprise has been the support and encouragement
that I have received from complete strangers. For one reason or
another, they have found my website and in some cases their offers of
help have led to me getting in touch with families (in one case after a
search that took in contacts in Berkshire, Somerset, Ireland and New
York). In other cases where people have not been able to offer
immediate practical help, their words of encouragement have made a big
difference to me. Often historical research can be very isolating and
to know that there are others who share my interest in the outcome is
very heartening (as well as providing valuable support for any
approaches I make to publishers in future).
And of course the Internet is a vast and ever-expanding
resource for active searching on my part. There are databases of
information, search aids, places to find expert advice, sites where I
can print off street maps of places I'm visiting, and much much more.
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Events where I have given presentations on my project
Despite being told by various people that all of this
would only ever be of interest to the families of the men in the
photograph, I have had a good turn-out to presentations that I have
given and a great response. Details of a couple of specific events can
be found in the Animated
Film section of this website. So many people are interested
in family history and in the First World War and history in general,
and there are many ways for them to connect their own lives to this
project. There is also generally a lot of interest in how I have gone
about the research, in particular how I have managed to make contact
with the families.
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What next?
It is a real milestone to have made contact with all the
families but there is still quite a lot to do. There are some obvious
archive sources that I have not made use of (in particular those at
schools and universities, and there are some local newspapers that
would no doubt have relevant information). Unfortunately, further
research is going to have to wait until I have found a source of
funding. Instead, I have spent time developing my animated film and I
am looking at ways to get this to a wider audience.
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