Since our return to the UK from Hong Kong in 2001, shortly after my father’s death, I started to take an interest in family history research. I have since compiled a fairly extensive family tree of my and Sue’s families on ancestry.co.uk. This family tree is in the public domain and is available for access by other family researchers - a fact that has proved useful on several occasions when I have received helpful comments and corrections from other researchers.
When my mother moved into a residential home near Abingdon, a couple of years before her death in 2009, I came across an album of photographs from my father’s period of service in India during World War II. This has lead me on to try to flesh out the details of my father's military service between 1940 and 1946. I accordingly approached Forces War Records and the Ministry of Defence in 2019.
After a rather lengthy delay occasioned by the intervention of the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on government office working practices during 2020 and 2021, the Ministry of Defence records office provided me with copies of the contents of my father’s Army service file. This confirmed that he enlisted initially in the Territorial Army in St Albans on 26th February 1940 and was demobbed as a Staff Sergeant, Royal Engineers on 24th February 1946.
So much I already knew, albeit the service records added some more detailed information about my father’s training at Aldershot and service in the UK prior to his posting to India in 1941. There remained however a gaping hole in the records only filled initially by the photograph album, compiled by my father during his period of service in India.
(to be continued)