All in the Family: Remember, Discover and Kut

After the excitement of the trip to the seaside last weekend, I've come down to earth with a bump.  I'm not sure whether it's the lull before the storm of activity at Easter, or just the ongoing cold which, like those that so many of my friends seem to have, or have just had, seems to be going on for weeks on end with no appreciable sign of improvement.  I've felt no inclination to go out so, apart from essentials, I've been at my desk thinking about the relatives again.

This week my interest has been taken up with my father's second-eldest brother, Will.  Like his elder sibling, Charlie, Will served in the Great War and it's always been my impression that, on returning from the conflict, they didn't rejoin the rest of the family but instead made their lives elsewhere. Certainly that's the case with Charlie, who settled in Derbyshire, where he married a war widow in the early 1920s.  They went on to add twins to the children she already had, and I have a picture of one of the twins in the Home Guard in 1943, and another of him, with his father and mine on the seafront at Great Yarmouth in the 'fifties.  Charlie died in 1963, but his son, who never married, continued to make the occasional visit to his Norfolk cousins before his own death in 1983.

I believe Will and his wife made only one visit to us from their home on the other side of Norfolk, for although they lived much closer to us, transport was difficult and complex, and Katie, his wife, was either blind or partially sighted.  He was a heavily built man, and I was told that, of all the brothers, it was he who most closely resembled their father.  He was about eight years older than my dad, who I remember was very upset when Will died; I suppose the age-gap was sufficient to command a kind of respect over and above the normal sibling affection.  It was certainly enough for it to seem to Will that I was from a different world, for another of my few memories is of attending Katie's funeral, when he had asked who this young man (I was in my early twenties) was.  The only explanation he could understand was that I was 'Jack's boy' (Jack being my father).

This week I've been researching Katie's family and, as a result, have added over forty new names to my records as I've discovered her paternal grandparents, born about 1820, and gradually followed all of her father's siblings through the censuses of the nineteenth century.  What did fascinate me was the way that, wherever they lived across the county, they seemed all to have evaded the interrogation of 1861!  Depending what alternative excitements next week offers, I might spend some time looking into her mother's family.  I wonder whether Greaves will be any easier to unravel than Savory!

I decided to look into that side of the tree because I thought I knew all there was to be found about Will.  I do remember being puzzled in my youth that there was never a mention of their having had children.  I had taken for granted, of course, a marriage soon after the war when bridegrooms were scarce!  This week I discovered why there was no family.  They weren't married until 1936, and Katie was Will's senior by more than ten years! This now raises the probably unanswerable question of where was Will for nearly twenty years before his marriage ... and what was he doing in that time?

One question about him that I have tried to answer concerns his military service.  However, with the unfortunate combination of a common name like William Evans and no knowledge of his regiment or service number, I stand little or no chance of finding out anything significant.  One thing I do know, however, was my dad's the answer to what was possibly the only time I asked him what his brothers had done in the war.  I think there was a total disregard of Charlie, as dad's monosyllabic reply told me, "Will was at Kut."

Now, call it coincidence if you will that, in the week when my research has led me in this direction, a tweet from the National Archives announced that, on a Wednesday afternoon in April, there will be a free talk entitled "Mesopotamia and the Siege of Kut-al-Amara".  I went through a 'drop-everything-do-this' phase and, within the hour, I had secured a place at the event and ordered my train tickets to get there.  I have no idea what of relevance the talk and discussion will reveal, but if nothing else I might get an idea of the significance of that whole episode of the War in the Middle East - an aspect of the conflict that normally loses out to the far greater attention paid to the Western Front.

So you see, I hadn't misspelled my title after all!