A Barnsley Historian's View

It's been a busy eight days or so and I'm frankly astonished I've held up so long. Last night my legs barely carried me up the stairs and this morning I don't want to get out of the warm, soft, bed, which has a wheely table ideally positioned for typing, reading and eating. In fact so far I've only got up to forage for food, clean my teeth and put the last but one load of washing in the tumble dryer (as the washing line outside is quite out of the question in the current monsoon).

So, what have I done this week:
Last Sunday I attended the unveiling of the Dearne Towns War Memorial at Bolton upon Dearne Cemetery. The OH took me in the car, so actually it wasn't a very arduous day, although we did do a quick trip to the supermarket too and the ceremony in the morning had involved a lot of standing up unsupported while the OH took photos.

The Northern General Hospital in Sheffield

On Monday I had a hospital appointment in Sheffield (I wrote about this journey last year, it's always a doozy). It should have been four bus rides, a total of an hour and half travelling each way, but a huge hole in the 'leading up to peak hours' 265 timetable caught me out on the way home (I had just missed one and had a 50 minute wait for the next) so I added a devious move via Chapeltown and caught a train instead which actually got me back to Barnsley at about the time the 265 was due at the hospital. Still, total time out of the house exceeded five hours, and I travelled on five different buses and a train!

On Tuesday I rested - well that was the theory - actually I cleaned, gardened, cooked, and typed up stories about the unveiling of war memorials. Odd how even on a rest day you still need food ... Oh and there was the upsetting discovery that my talk for the Friends of Barnsley Archives, booked by them last September, about Barnsley War Memorials (link to poster), which I am going to do on 10th November at 7pm in the Learning Lab at Experience Barnsley, had not made it into the Experience Barnsley brochure about 'The Road to War' which was launched this week. Being tired I got very emotional and the OH had to do a lot of hugging and reassuring me that I wasn't being purposely overlooked because I'm rubbish. It later transpired that it wasn't included because it attracts a charge - which is made to raise money for the Archives - all the other events listed are free.

James Hirst, who has no known grave,
remembered on his parents' grave at Wombwell

On Wednesday I was collected by a friend in his surprisingly cool car (can't say more as I don't want to a) identify the chap and b) embarrass said chap) and whisked off to Wombwell Cemetery. We knew the Friends of the Cemetery were 'in' on Wednesday mornings and we hoped they'd be able to help us in our search for War Memorial Gravestones. Unfortunately their priorities don't particularly match ours and although a gentleman has created a file of soldiers who are buried in the cemetery (CWGC gravestones - we aren't particularly interested in them per se) and of men from Wombwell some of whom are remembered on their family gravestones the referencing and mapping was insufficient for us to be able to go straight to the plots. So we opted for the 'walking up and down the aisles' approach. My colleague on one side of the cemetery and myself on the other.

Within an hour I'd photographed 15 gravestones, 11 of them War Memorial ones and four which were probably actually burials - useful for information for our project even so. It had started to spit with rain so I went and had a sit down in the Friends' building at the Cemetery entrance and met up with a lady I know from the Archives. Back out again after twenty minutes or so I soon racked up a total of 23 War Memorials gravestones and 93 photos! That was enough for me, an hour and a half slow walking up and down, I was finished! But my colleague, who doesn't know me very well yet, was keen to continue and it was another hour or so before he was ready to take me home. I wasn't much use for anything else that day.

On Thursday I visited Barnsley Archives in the Town Hall. Several of my friends and some of the Archive staff commented on how tired I looked. Fortunately searching the digitised Barnsley Chronicle is quite soothing and I always bring along my own laptop riser and wrist rest to make life easier. I managed about two and half hours, with breaks to help a visitor from Kent who was having trouble using the other copy of the Chronicle and to chat with various friends. Well, that's the other reason I go, it's a cheap way to meet people and socialise. You just have to buy some printouts (40p a sheet) and they'll let you stay for hours! There wasn't even any reason to rush home that day as the OH had left at 7am for the Great British Beer Festival without me. The first time in 22 years I haven't gone down to London for the summer. Yes, another reason I'm a bit down at the moment. But I am keeping up with events on Facebook and Twitter!

On Friday I could stay in, so another rest day. I wrote up three Barnsley Soldiers Remembered stories that I'd had on file for a while. My ToDo list for the Barnsley War Memorials Project (BWMP) is horrendous. I am the Secretary and main creator of the web pages and run the Facebook and Twitter accounts too. I am also researching three war memorials of my own (they do overlap a bit - that's why I'm doing three) and helping out with a couple of others (one of our researchers lives in Woking so he can't get at the Barnsley Chronicle as it's only available in Barnsley Archives). My new boots, bought with money from my Mum, arrived, and on opening turned out to be the wrong colour - since when is 'honey' anything like black? Grrr! They will have to be returned - to Germany of all places!

Poster for WW1 Event

On Saturday I had promised to attend the Thurnscoe Local History Group's WW1 Event. A friend's mum had told me (via Facebook) which bus to catch and where to get off, so I had a well worked out plan for the travel - it's only a 15 minute ride in a car to Thurnscoe from our house according to Google Maps but rather longer on the bus. Of course the car was not an option as the OH has gone to London ...

What I didn't know was that the rain on Friday night had damaged and some said flooded, Barnsley Bus Station, to the extent that it was (and as far as I know still is) closed. When my first bus arrived in Barnsley we were all told to get off at the Railway Station. Passengers for Thurnscoe and Wombwell and other places on the south and east of Barnsley were being directed to Sheffield Road to catch onward travelling services. I don't expect you to be that familiar with Barnsley, so I'll just explain that from the Railway Station to Sheffield Road is about half a mile walk and involves either going through the undertoft of the markets (strong smell of fish) and around the multi-story carparks that they cleverly built blocking the pedestrian routes into town or by walking through the pedestrian areas and through the Alhambra shopping precinct (this route only works in the day time as when the shops are closed you can't get through the Alhambra). Either way it's a long walk and involves several slopes and sets of steps or long ramps. They had made no arrangements for the elderly or disabled. I saw one old couple head towards the taxi rank to get a ride up to Sheffield Road - but I can't afford that.

I had a five minute connection for my onward 219 bus to Thurnscoe, well, of course, I missed it as it took at least ten minutes to get to Sheffield Road. Sadly if the Cudworth bus driver had told us about the bus station being closed I could have bailed out a stop early and cut through to Sheffield or Doncaster Road (slightly further along the route) avoiding the town centre altogether, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. The other people at the stop told me my next bus to Thurnscoe was the 226, I had researched this one, it takes longer to get there but at least I'd be moving. It wasn't due for another twenty minutes or so though. While I was waiting I noticed that there were no SYPTE (South Yorkshire Transport) people on the site to help travellers find the right buses, if the stop a bus was meant to visit was already occupied (and there are only two bus stops on that stretch of road) then the buses were pulling in anywhere and relying on the passengers to spot them and make their way to them. The 226 pulled in at the very bottom of the layby and an elderly lady had to be given an arm by a chap to rush there before it pulled away.

I hadn't bargained on the reality of the actual length of time it was going to take to get to my destination via this route - over an hour! Good job I'd prepared by eating and drinking nothing since 5am. With a tour of Wombwell (wave to War Memorial on the way past), Cortonwood (wave at War Memorial), Wath upon Dearne (out of area for us but wave to War Memorial all the same), Bolton upon Dearne (ooh, already been here this week, wave at both War Memorials), Goldthorpe (nope, haven't a clue where the church, library or Working Men's Club are relative to my position so no waving possible) and finally Thurnscoe, I arrived at the Rainbow Centre two hours and fifteen minutes after I'd left home!

Thurnscoe's War Memorial - I've seen it!

The display was great and the man I had arranged to meet very friendly. He has agreed to allow BWMP to use his photos of church windows and other hard to access and hard to photograph memorials. Result! and very grateful thanks!

I was directed to the Thurnscoe War Memorial, well I couldn't go all the way there and not visit could I? Photo on left.

I had been given some helpful advice about buses too and decided to try the alternative route that Travel South Yorkshire had suggested in order to avoid Barnsley town centre on the way home. This involved a bus to Great Houghton and a change to another bus direct to Cudworth where I live. Looks sensible on the map ... Ha!

The 219 (which does go all the way to Barnsley, but that wasn't my plan) turned up on time and I asked the driver where was best to get off in Great Houghton - another place I'd only ever been driven through by the OH before. I really didn't comprehend the complexity of the apparently simple task of changing buses in the village. The 219 driver helpfully told me that the 26 (the bus to Cudworth via ATOS and Grimethorpe) would stop any of the stops in the village where he stopped. So I got off near the church, well you never know I might have time for a look around. Hmm, a quick look at the timetable on the bus stop showed I'd missed the connection by about five minutes and the 26s were only once an hour. I went and had a look at the church as there was no seat in the bus stop. It was shut, of course, but I sort of waved at the War Memorial which I would like to see in real life one day. Photo on the BWMP web page by the chap I'd been talking to in Thurnscoe incidently.

I carried on walking, in search of a bus stop with seat nearby if not at the stop, past the chapel (closed, of course, but wave at War Memorials anyway) and on down to the Miners' Welfare Hall which has a War Memorial but the BWMP hasn't got a photo good enough for a transcription yet, so another one I'd like to see in person one day. There were seats outside the hall and a bus stop just beyond the grounds so I waited and tried to read the Barnsley Chronicle I'd bought in Thurnscoe in the rather gusty winds. I and some others are not particularly happy about the plan of a Barnsley councillor, Joe Hayward, and Dan Jarvis, one of our MPs, to campaign for a new memorial to the Barnsley Pals in France. Yes, the Pals lost lots of men there, but what about the rest of Barnsley's casualties, the other 4000 Fallen and the thousands of men who came home wounded and traumatised.

Finally on the right bus, after a couple of false alarms, and the bus filling up to standing room only with people wearing red polo shirts at ATOS (must have been shift change) I eventually got home at about 4pm. I'd left at 10.15am. So another long day, and a lot of walking. I would have gone straight to bed, except I'd stripped it for washing that morning, so I had to get the hoover out (I'm allergic to dust mites along with everything else so the bed has to be hoovered every week!) and put on the new bedding. Sooooo tired!

Great British Beer Festival Tannoy seat and Radio seat in the office

But to cheer me up my daughter had posted some pics on Facebook of the Great British Beer Festival Organiser's Office team working well without me. Kinda wish I was there for the friends and a bit of beer, and having seen the pics on Facebook this morning of the rain and the puddles they've got in Olympia, oddly missing it even more as it will be exciting down there today.

Well that was my week - and I might get up in a while, maybe after lunch - or then again I might not, after all you can watch tv on the internet these days from the comfort of your bed! And I have soooo many War Memorial photos to catch up on!

Red filled oval with the words Post Office in white

Since the government is determined to pay everyone their benefits into a bank account these days I expected opening one of the new current accounts at the Post Office to be plain sailing, but no, something I said or ticked on the form didn't fulfil their criteria and I was sent away head hanging knowing I'd failed at yet another attempt to be a normal everyday person.

Let me explain, as you may not have read many, or indeed any of my blog posts before:

I was diagnosed with a couple of chronic illnesses about eight years ago now. Due to my increasing tiredness and appalling sick record at work my employers attempted to 'terminate' my contract when my application for early retirement due to ill health was turned down because, according to the doctor at the local pension authority, I would be fit to return to full time work within three years. Eventually, with support from friends, I was able to hold out for redundancy and officially left my employment in early 2011. I hadn't been at work since the summer of 2009. And, as you can easily calculate, I have not miraculously become well enough to work in specified time period, and even the DWP agrees I am still unfit for work, although not unfit enough to get Employment and Support Allowance beyond the one year cut off.

I am now wholly dependent on my husband (the OH) for food, clothes and a roof over my head. This is not what he signed up for when he married me - at that point I had a good job, I even earned more than him towards the end of my job. Fortunately we had paid off our mortagage before I was made redundant - but that's another story!

These days, if I am careful and count spoons (read this article for an explanation of spoons), I can get about a bit, go to the library for a local history meeting and the Archives to do some research. I don't go 'out' anymore, unless the OH takes me in the car, and I used to love real ale pubs and beer festivals. This summer for the first time in 22 years I have not gone down to London to work (as a volunteer) at the biggest beer festival in Britain - the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia, because in order to qualify for the free accommodation you have to work a certain number of hours a day and I just can't manage it any more. CAMRA, who organise the event, have been much, much more accommodating than my 'real' employers ever were, they have allowed me to work split shifts for the past three or four years so that I could go and get my head down for a few hours on an afternoon and they transferred me to a desk job about six years ago when it became apparent I just couldn't manage the hours and effort needed to be a Bar Manager any longer.

Last year I began to give local and family history talks for a small fee, which just about covered my expenses (paper, printing, leaflets, photocopies and the OH's petrol money for taking me to Sheffield and places even further afield), and mostly I get paid by cheque. Little local history groups and church groups don't generally keep large petty cash funds and it is perfectly usual for me to turn up and the cheque has already been written and signed and I am given it even before I begin to set up, let alone speak.

At the end of June our local branch of Santander was closed, at no notice at all. We had been told it was to close in July and then apparently one afternoon in June two men turned up and closed the branch telling the staff that that was it, with no notice to them either! I had been accustomed to paying in my cheques there and any others the OH receives as the co-ordinator of his work's lottery syndicate (no, they never seem to win anything!) and as the branch was only a few hundred yards from our house it was well within my normal capability to get there. I did ask at the local Post Office, but at that time all they could offer was envelopes for me to post the cheques to our bank's central offices.

The nearest branch of Santander is now in Barnsley, four miles and a ten to fifteen minute bus ride away, plus about a five to ten minute walk through the town centre from the bus station to the branch. Not far on a good day, but on a bad or even on a middling day, it is a step too far for me. So when I saw that the Post Office was going to start offering current accounts targeted at people on low incomes or on benefits I thought, "This is perfect, I'll have one of those!".

Extra encouragement to change banks had been provided by my last couple of experiences trying to pay cheques into the branch of Santander in Barnsley town centre where they had queried my latest talk expenses cheque (for just £35) because it wasn't made out to my full name. I am one of those not uncommon people who is known by my middle name rather than my official first name ... and the Family History Society I had spoken at had written the cheque out to the name I am known by, and as I mentioned, had it ready for me when I arrived, not that I would have thought it was necessary to get my full and precise name on the cheque ... I can easily prove I have two names - they are both on my full photo id driving licence for goodness sake and both are listed on our bank account too! Unnecessarily fussy in my opinion.

Three Post Office gift cards, one pink, one blue and one black in an offset pile.

The Post Office current accounts have been on trial in the north of England for some time and have just been rolled out in our area (according to the lady in the Post Office in Barnsley this morning). I received an email yesterday - I had registered my interest online - telling me that I could now open an account and that if I switched accounts before the end of August I would be given a £100 gift voucher. Wow! Free money! Yes!

I printed out my copies of my proofs of id (they now expect you to provide your own photocopies) and filled in the form for the account switch. I was going into town today anyway to visit Barnsley Archive for a bit of First World War soldier research so I planned to call at the main post office, which had been indicated on my email, afterwards.

According to their website"Pop into one of our account-opening branches and fill in an application form. We’ll process it while you wait and aim to open your account there and then." Hmm, that is the point it all started to go wrong. I gave them my switching form and id documents and I said quite distinctly, "I want to open a new current account and I want to switch my present bank account to it and claim my gift voucher please." Her first question, looking down at my part completed switching form, "Have you already opened a current account with us as I need to put your new account details on this form?""No," I replied, "I want to do that now, as I just mentioned to you.""Oh, yes, you did say that ...."

You cannot open one of these accounts online - it says that on the website. The lady cashier behind the counter then said to me, "Have you filled the form in online?", me, "Err, no, there was no way to do that." Cashier, "Oh, well I'll have to ask you to fill in the form in one of our booklets", me, "Yes, OK - do you a have a chair, I'm not very good on my feet today, I am disabled". They let me sit in the little office they have for interviews to fill in the five or six page form. I was even given a Current Account freebie pen! Filling the form in online would have been much more sensible, I could have typed instead of writing and it would have saved a lot of hassle for the staff.

The lady in that office looked through my form, supposedly making sure I had filled it in correctly, but then she explained that she hadn't done the training on the new accounts yet, but that they were sending her on a three day course next week (A three day course in checking peoples' forms when they open a bank account? What?) After that I had to go back to the counter and wait to be seen again, more standing up, and wait some more while the cashier entered all the details I'd just written in the tiny boxes on the form onto her computer. She was not qualified to check my id which was a necessary part of the process, but the lady from the office said she'd deal with that afterwards (Well, I am glad she's done that course - wonder how many days that took?) Meanwhile I was drooping, leaning more and more on the counter, putting my head down on my bag, shuffling my feet to spread the aches and pains around a bit and hoping it would all be completed soon.

Computer Says No around the David Walliams Little Britain character sat at a computer

Then the computer said no! The cashier explained that the system had timed out while it was checking my data and that the only option on her screen was to abandon the application. I wasn't having that - having got there and filled in the form by hand and waited and stood up for so long wanted my new account and I wanted my £100 gift voucher!

The cashier consulted with the lady from the office - then she phoned someone. She came back to the counter - remember that all this is happening in full public view in the middle of a busy town centre Post Office - and she began to read code numbers off the screen to the person on the other end of the phone. I was still leaning and drooping.

Eventually she put down the phone and said that she'd been told to give me back all my forms and id and to tell me that I would be contacted within ten working days with a decision on my application. Oh, yeh! "Did I fail the credit check?" I said. "Oh, no," she said, "The system just timed out checking your application." "What does that mean?" I asked. "Oh, it's just the system, I don't know." she replied. I protested that in two weeks ('cos ten working days is a fortnight) I would have timed out for qualifying for the gift voucher as that application needed to be made before the end of August. She took me and my forms back to the lady in the office ... who said the same things, reassuring me that next week, after she had done the training, she would be able to sort out my problems if I didn't get a response within the ten working days.

Err, my gift voucher ... the email, only sent yesterday ... less than two weeks deadline ... sort out my new account there and then ... I tried and tried but to be honest both ladies were powerless, the computer had said no! and that was it.

So I came home and wrote a blog post about it ... as it helps stop me crying.
Sorry!

*space bar on my laptop is sticking, so apologies for any run together words!*

Since August I have been so busy with work for the Barnsley War Memorials Project, and happily so well (relatively), that I haven't had a moment to myself to write a blog post.
This blog began two years ago as a way of talking to the larger world about my problems and my ambitions. Well, one of my ambitions is over - I have now finished at the Open University as their fees are ridiculous. I achieved another degree, not that I really wanted or needed it, I would rather have just had the option to continue dipping in and out of the OU modules as it suited me for the rest of my life. I am still disabled ... well that wasn't going to change whatever the government think, but apart from my knees (and that's a story in itself) and a tendency to frequent visits to the toilet when I'm tired and worn out, I'm mostly coping with that OK now. I have a hobby that keeps me busy, at home, on the computer and with once a week trips to Barnsley Archives to meet a friend for a change of scenery and the occasional glass of Pinot Grigio.
I still have no income, unless you count £35 a month from the talks I give, although I see that more as expenses for the travel, books, photocopies and sheer time it takes me to put a talk together. Apparently, according to Barnsley Museum's new guidelines I am a business though, so they currently can't display my leaflets, leaving me with few outlets to advertise my willingness to give talks! Circular or what?

S70 4HX on Right Move

We still haven't sold the other house, the OH spends so much time at work, or at the other house or just busy with CAMRA stuff that I am beginning to feel unmarried ... we are just about to change estate agents for the second time. In three years only one couple has been to visit the house and they were friends of the OH. It's a nice house, 3 bedrooms, sitting room with Adam style fireplace and sliding doors to balcony, proper shower and a bath, modern oak doored kitchen (built in oven, ceramic hob) adjoining dining room with built in floor to ceiling bookshelves, deceptively spacious (the photo really doesn't do it justice), and it's got a garage which is an unusual thing so close to a town centre. Only 15 minutes walk from Barnsley Railway Station, shops, pubs and takeaways nearby, nice compact low maintenance mature garden, with strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries and tayberries!

Ok, advert over!

So how come I've got time to write a blog post today? Well, firstly I'm still in bed. After the busy week I've just had my knees have decided to quit! I dislocated my left knee twice in three weeks recently and it took much longer to go back into place the second time. As I result I've been walking with a stick for a while. Of course limping puts extra stain on the other leg and after three talks, a book launch and the usual trip to the Archives this week they have now told me they want a rest. Secondly, due to the three talks mentioned above now having occurred I am having a little breather before I get back to work creating web pages for the Barnsley War Memorials Project (mostly war memorial gravestones) and researching the soldiers on my own chosen war memorials, St Lukes, Worsborough Common and St John's Barebones.

My St John's Community on Lives of the First World War

I have been creating communities on Lives of the First World War - I do find this quite soothing, the satisfaction of finding the soldiers and flagging them up as "Remembered" and attaching them to a Community so other people can see who belongs with who. LFFW got off to a rocky start as far as I could see, unless you were already an experienced family or military historian the original interface was very daunting. However a recent change, adding the Timeline view, has fixes a lot of the problems with making the site easy to understand, I think. There are a lot more prompts to help casual visitors add stories and images and the chronological layout as you add more and more information encourages you and makes the soldier's story easy to follow.

Part of James A Warden's Timeline

*I have just had to swap to Internet Explorer to edit this post as Firefox was doing all kinds of odd things - it might have been my fault - I tried to paste a picture directly into the post - silly me!*

As a beta tester, and for allowing IWM to use my Communities in their publicity and as a 12 month subscriber to Find My Past I have collected over two year's free managerial access to LFWW. This allows me to create and manage Communities, search and view premium content and that's about it really. Given that anyone can add an external link to another pay per view site or add documentary evidence of any other kind to prove the facts about the soldiers to only real benefit to paying (if you already have a subscription to Ancestry or the Genealogist say) is the ability to make Communities. So pay £6 for a month, do it quick and then don't pay again unless you find you need to add a lot more people to your community I suggest.

If I can set up Communities for the other volunteers of the Barnsley War Memorials Project, or in the case of the new Worsbrough Dale book, based on existing publications, then non-subscribers will be able to find their relatives more easily based on which area the man came from ... that's my plan.

So I have a Community for Cudworth and one for Worsborough Common and one for Monk Bretton for example. I just keep linking the men in, the fallen and the survivors, whenever one comes to my attention.

I really need to send a couple of emails today as well, but I'm prevaricating about that - shouldn't do really. And a book might turn up in the Amazon Locker in our local Co-op later today, and I need to buy a Chronicle - which reminds me that I'm weeks behind on taking the cuttings from the Chron. And I'm booked for a talk in December which I haven't really thought about yet. Oh drat ... too much stuff.

Better go and do something useful.
Bye!

I have just added a page to the Barnsley War Memorials Project website that is like a blog post in itself. So for all my followers on this blog here's a link.

An extract from the 1918 Absent Voters' List (thanks to Barnsley Archives)

I am transcribing the streets that make up the parish of St John the Baptist in the Barebones area of Barnsley. There are 140 men on the war memorial for this church and I have been researching them on and off for the past year. Many of the OH's ancestors and relatives lived in the area although none of them appear to be named on the memorial. There was a streak of non-conformity in the OH's family and I think I need to track down more of the chapel memorials to find the missing names.

In the snip above I was pleased to see a nurse listed. This won't be a very common occurrence as despite a universal franchise for men over 21 being brought in towards the end of the war women still had to be over 30 and fulfil certain property qualifications to have the vote. And of course they had to be serving abroad to appear in this list. That narrows it down rather a lot!

Katherine Sarah Blackburn was a doctor's wife living in the big house on Sheffield Road, Barnsley which is now the Warren House Dental Practice. She was born in 1879 in Hartlepool, Co Durham and had been married to Vernon Kent Blackburn, a physician and surgeon, for six years by the time of the 1911 census. They had two children, John Kent Hartley Blackburn aged 5 and Olga Mary Blackburn aged 3 in 1911. They married in the September quarter (Jul, Aug, Sep) of 1904 in Newport in Wales and Katherine's maiden name was Shotton, a great northern name and one that features in my own family tree!

I look forward to researching her in more depth ... having found that link to Durham I won't let this one go in a hurry! I also want to know what took her to Salonica as a nurse in WW1, that will be a great story I'm sure.

Since this time last year I have been deeply involved with the Barnsley War Memorials Project however my interest in the First World War and the experiences of the men and their families goes back a lot further.

I have been researching my family history since 1992 but at that time there were very few easily accessible resources available for the First World War. It is hard to remember what it was like without online searchable databases, but 20 years ago most research was done from microfiche and film, transcriptions and original records on site in local Record Offices and Archives. For me the major breakthrough was the Army Service (and Pension) Records coming online on the Ancestry website in 2007, when it became so much easier to research soldiers if your man's records were in the 40% of the burnt records (the majority of the Service Records were destroyed in the blitz in WW2) that survived. Medal Index Cards had been available from the Public Record Office online from shortly before that - but at a cost (unless you were actually in the Public Record Office in Kew) and of little use if your man had a common name (these are now also on Ancestry). I appear to have started saving images of soldiers' entries from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website in 2008. So much has changed over the past seven years! Even the CWGC pages use to be a snazzy overall purple colour quite unlike the cool grey and striking red and green of today.

A CWGC snip from 2008

Connaught Cemetery September 2009

I discovered that a large number of the OH's relatives were involved in the war. My own family tree is less well populated by soldiers - I suppose that is the contrast between his family in urban, industrialised Barnsley and my North-Eastern families many of whom came from predominantly rural areas, with a bit of coal mining on one side or from coastal towns concerned with sailing and ship building on the other. By the time the OH and I travelled to Belgium in 2009 to visit the battlefield cemeteries with Leger Travel I had already researched enough of our WW1 soldiers to print out a page full of names and references to check should we go to the correct memorials and cemeteries.

I gave a talk to the Friends of Barnsley Archives in March 2013 based on three of the OH's relatives' experiences of WW1 using photos we had taken in 2009 of Tyne Cot, the Menin Gate and the Connaught Cemetery near Thiepval where Frank Armitage is buried.

My interest has been expressed on this blog by a series of First World War Soldier Stories beginning in April 2013 with Frank (see the eponymous tab above for links to all the stories) and from July 2013 was directed into Barnsley War Memorials after a request for another talk for the Friends of Barnsley Archives to be given in November 2014. As 2014 would be the first year of the Centenary of the First World War a talk booked for November had to be about the war and as the date of the booking would fall the 10th of the month it seemed appropriate to try to pull together sufficient information on local memorials to reflect the concentration on Remembrance which we were sure would pervade by then.

A fellow historian got to know about my interest in WW1 War Memorials and I was asked to attend a meeting to discuss the possibility of some kind of group to collate a Roll of Honour of Barnsley's WW1 Fallen. In the course of each of our own research paths we had both discovered that Barnsley Council had not produced a list of names of the Fallen after WW1, unlike many other towns and cities across Great Britain. Sheffield has a Roll of Honour kept in the Town Hall, and I had used a transcription of it in my research into my first husband's family history in the 1990s. Fortunately there aren't many Tom Appleby Dunbars in the world as the list only gives very brief details, name, number, rank and regiment. Incidentally this list can now be consulted online at the Sheffield Soldiers of the Great War website. The lack of a similar memorial in Barnsley seemed slightly shocking, but surely something that could be relatively easily amended. Ah, the innocence of those early discussions!

The Barnsley War Memorials Project was formally constituted in March of 2014 with a committee of Chair, Treasurer, Secretary and Information Officer, later co-opting a Council Liaison Officer when it became apparent that this would be helpful. As the lady who had called the original meeting was keen to pursue her own research projects she is not a part of the constituted Project, however she continues to submit research to Barnsley Archives on an independent basis. She recently presented two folders of research about the men named on the Barnsley Holgate Grammar School Old Boys WW1 Memorial Plaque (now on display in the Cooper Art Gallery) to the Archives.

The Barnsley War Memorials Project now has a website, created using Blogger software, just like this blog, but now fronted by a dedicated domain name www.barnsleywarmemorials.org.uk which appears to give it a little more credibility with organisations and individuals who look down upon 'blogs'! We also have a Facebook page and a Twitter account. I have had to do a bit of up-skilling to learn to manage these various forms of social media - but in my opinion you need to use every available option to publicise a project, from newspaper articles to tweets!

BWMP newsletter December 2014

My regular duties as Secretary include answering emails, creating web pages for individual war memorials, creating Barnsley Soldiers Remembered webpages from information submitted by family members of soldiers from the Barnsley area, and writing and distributing a monthly digital newsletter. There are now eight issues all available to download from the Newsletters tab on our website. I also post on the Facebook page and regularly Tweet to pass on our updates and to generally make people more aware of the work of the Project.

I have been well booked for talks in 2014. I spoke to a conference in Leicester about the ins and outs of WW1 research; I have spoken to the Friends of Darfield Churchyard on some of the men on their memorials and to the ladies of Holmfirth Womens Institute on Families in World War One. My talk on "Who Wanted War Memorials?" was well received in November and can be seen in two parts on YouTube and I have since given a talk on the Barnsley War Memorials Project itself raising some useful petty cash for our Project. I also gave short talks on the First World War to two primary schools in the Cudworth area in November and hope to be invited back next year. I took part in the launch of the South Yorkshire Through Time webhub at Experience Barnsley by giving a brief talk on the progress of the Barnsley War Memorials Project and explaining how we use social media to connect with the public.

I enjoy researching other people's Soldier Stories and in the past year through them have discovered a wealth of other resources that could be applied to my own family history. Some of these are featured in the most recent edition of the newsletter (see left), Almanacs, local newspapers, community websites, Absent Voters Lists. Others that I can think of are the wealth of books on the subject of War Memorials and the First World War that are available - Barnsley Pals by Jon Cooksey is particularly useful (and Pen & Sword, the military book publishers are based in Barnsley) but I have also enjoyed more general books like Memorials of the Great War in Britain by Alex King (looking at the symbolism and politics of Remembrance), The Origins of the First World War by Annika Mombauer (the title says it all!), Empires of the Dead by David Crane (the story of Fabian Ware the man behind the CWGC) and most recently A Kingdom United by Catriona Pennell (which looks at popular responses to the outbreak of the First World War).

I have been an enthusiastic first adopter of the Imperial War Museum's Lives of the First World War website. I now have Communities set up on the site for many of the War Memorials in Barnsley and have remembered over 700 men - but there are so many more ...

I am also more aware of the growing number of local websites around the country created by groups carrying out their own research into War Memorials and the Great War. I particularly like the Tynemouth World War One Commemoration Project as they have been working for some years now and have lots of ideas that we would love to 'borrow'. One is a map of the local area with spots to indicate where each Fallen man had lived - they do a great Powerpoint presentation which shows these maps and spots changing over the period of the war. They also recently featured on a BBC television programme. Brilliant!

There are also a host of books produced by these local groups and organisations who are researching the history of their own area during WW1. Most recently Kingstone Remembered (as seen in the December newsletter above) but also see Royston and District in the Great War (which I wrote about last year) and Lest Cudworth Forgets written in 2004 by the Cudworth History and Heritage Group. This year there have also been two books from the Penistone History Group, one about the men on the Penistone War Memorial and one about the men from Thurlstone and Hoylandswaine. There has been a booklet from the Billingley Village History Group on the men from their village who fought, fell and returned home (see issue 4 of the BWMP newsletter for details) and a book from the Worsbrough History Group on the names on the Worsbrough Dale War Memorial at St Thomas' Church.

This means that the experience of assisting with a large borough wide project has given me additional insights into co-operating with other local groups, improving my own research and widened my understanding of the background, politics and social history of the First World War - which is not a bad thing!

So, why do I Research First World War Soldiers' Stories? Because I find them fascinating slices of early 20th century social history - because they intertwine with the wider history of this country and the rest of Europe - because many of my own ancestors were touched by the issues that I am now coming to more fully understand and appreciate. Because they are relevant to everyone, young and old, that's why!

Thank you for reading - and please visit the Barnsley War Memorials Project website, have a look at the huge list (500+) of memorials we have discovered in the past year, view some of our photos and search the site for your own family names, then maybe take a side step and and read some of the Barnsley Soldiers Remembered stories linked to the memorials which can be found on the companion site.

Record Category Headings on FMP

Yesterday (Boxing Day) Find My Past sent me yet another promotional email telling me that they had added more records to their website. This is all well and good, but finding anything on their *@~%#!* website has been quite difficult since its 'upgrade' in April.

The old searches on the census returns that let you go straight to an address have been lost somewhere in the depths of their site and there are now dozens, if not hundreds (I have no idea!), of little data sets arranged under a very few general headings, see the list in my screen shot on the left. The only way to make certain you get a hit in the data set you want is to (a) know the data set exists in the first place and (b) head straight to it via the A to Z index of record sets, the bottom option on the list. Which makes it a bit difficult if you DON'T know that a particular record set exists. The Search All option does not return results from all the record sets - unless you leave the 'Where' option blank (ie don't put in Sheffield or Barnsley) meaning that you end up with dozens of entries to scroll through that you hadn't wanted at all. The only way to reduce the number is then to apply filters - but of course again you have to know what you are looking for to do this.

The record set that piqued my interest yesterday was this:
"Over 11,000 Yorkshire, Sheffield Quarter Sessions 1880-1912. The court of Quarter Sessions was established in 1880 and its initial function was to hear criminal cases. The court sat every quarter, usually in January, April, July and October and, after each session, a Calendar of Prisoners was published to record the personal details of people tried at the session and their offences." A bit of retrospective experimentation showed that this record set is categorised under Institutions & Organisations in the list above. Would I have been able to guess that? Not sure ...

My connection to family history in Sheffield is via my children (now well and truly grown up and left home) and my first husband (who shall remain nameless if you don't mind). I investigated that family tree more than 20 years ago when I was a single mother on benefits (so that tells you something about our dysfunctional family) because it was impossible to find a job that fitted in with dropping primary school age children off at school for 9am and picking them up again at 3pm. I used to spend the time between in Sheffield Archives - it kept me busy and saved on gas and electricity at home too! This is also when I started studying with the Open University.

Purely alphabetically I tried searching in the Quarter Sessions records for Atkinson and recognised a name in the list of results almost immediately. Arthur William Atkinson was one of the great, great grandfathers of my children and an ancestor I had always felt was a good 'un as he worked as a blacksmith all his life. Unfortunately I was about to discover that hard work does not always equate to being a good man. The entry I had found was a transcription that showed Arthur, of 81 Porter Street, Sheffield, was charged with the malicious wounding of his son and that he went to trial on 5 July 1904.

Results for Arthur William Atkinson in All Records on Find My Past

Out of interest I tried searching for Arthur William Atkinson in the All Records search - I put in Sheffield and did not get a hit on the Quarter Sessions record, however putting in Yorkshire brought back 1,403 results which did include it, halfway down the second page of results under Courts & Legal. So despite the new record set being specifically to do with Sheffield entering Sheffield in the All Records search is the WRONG thing to do!

Still on Find My Past I looked Arthur up in the Sheffield newspaper of the time, the Sheffield Evening Telegraph. I have got fairly good at filtering the newspaper records by name of the paper and by date - the only thing that annoys me is that if you go a step too far on the filtering you can't step back, you have to clear the ALL the filters and start again. I fail to understand how the exact same record set, British Newspapers, can be offered to the public by the same company, BrightSolid, via two different front ends with two entirely different search engines. The search on the British Newspaper Archive is much superior to the Find My Past version.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph 12 May 1904

The above newspaper cutting (part of a longer report) from May 1904 shows his initial appearance in the Police Courts where he is committed for trial at the Quarter Sessions. A report of the Quarter Sessions themselves on 6 July 1904 showed that he pleaded guilty of common assault and was bound over to come up for judgement if called upon. However in order to find the second cutting I had to change my search to look for Atkinson only as his first names appear distorted on the page and have not been OCR'd correctly. Fortunately I had the date of the trial from the Quarter Sessions index so could narrow down my search by date to hits in July 1904 only. The BNA search engine allows you to set date as a parameter at the offset - on FMP I have to apply layer after layer of filter to get the same result.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph 3 July 1918

While I was searching for mentions of Arthur William Atkinson in the Sheffield newspapers I was made happier to come across an entry for him which shows the family in a much better light.

This snip shows Matthew Jubilee Atkinson (born 1897 of course, Queen Victoria's Jubilee year!) as a Lance Corporal in the York and Lancaster Regiment in 1918. He has been awarded the Military Medal for Bravery. There in the caption are his parents, Mr and Mrs Arthur William Atkinson, now of 82 Carver Street.

To be honest I haven't done a lot of research on the soldiers in this family tree - so I was surprised to see that the article notes that Matthew would be 21 on 3 August 1918. As it also states he enlisted on 17 August 1914 that makes him only 17 years old at that time.

So here is a young man who enlisted underage at the outbreak of the war, apparently with the knowledge of the authorities, fought (according to the snip) at several large battles, Loos in September/October 1915, the first day of the Somme 1916 and the fighting on the Somme against the German advance in March of 1918.

I do know that Matthew re-enlisted in the army after the war and that later he emigrated to Australia. Long ago a family member from his branch contacted me from over there. I wonder if they know that he won the Military Medal?

Since I last wrote about Lives of the First World War (LFWW) back in May 2014 the site has improved its user interface with the introduction of the Timeline and with additional helpful hints on screen to assist with the addition of evidence and facts.

LFWW is a site created by the Imperial War Museum in co-operation with DC Thompson Family History to provide a permanent digital memorial to the men and women who served or who took part in the First World War. The site has been populated with the names of men and women who are listed in various data sources, known as seed data. Currently this includes:

Seed Data record sets on LFWW

Remember you can click on any of the images in my blog to see them enlarged if you can't quite make out the detail or words.

If a man does not appear in one of these data sets then you currently can't add information to the site, to his 'Life Story', for him yet. There are plans to add many more data sets in the future.

Other record sets are available on the site which can be searched and linked to a man's Life Story, some, like the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records can be searched and attached for NO charge once you have created a free account. Others, such as census records, and Army Service Records can only be viewed and attached if you are a subscriber.

A full list can be seen here.

Anyone can add photos and stories to the site to the Life Story of any man or woman of their choice - you just need to set up a free account (and I would recommend that you consider using a nickname when you do as the name you use appears on any record that you have added to). I will explain how to add some simple information in a little while.

I am a Friend of the site, which means that I have the equivalent of a paid up subscription - however I have obtained this on the back of beta testing for the site, allowing the IWM to use my contributions as examples in their talks and displays and as part of my annual Find My Past (FMP) subscription. A 12 month subscription to FMP allows you to have access to the premium features of LFWW for free on applying a code supplied by FMP on request. However any suggestions I make in this blog post will apply to users who have NOT paid a subscription because I want to make it plain and easy for everyone to use the LFWW site to remember their First World War relatives.

Some of my Communities on LFWW

Being a Friend and having premium access allows me to create Communities. This is a way of grouping the Life Stories, that is men or women's records, into sets which reflect some aspect of the First World War or your local community. There are Communities for individual ships for example, for separate army regiments or as I am doing for the Barnsley War Memorials Project (BWMP), for each parish or township in the Barnsley area, with a few more for individual war memorials where they are particularly unique, such as the Salvation Army Memorial Plaque.

As you can see in the snip above I have added over 1000 men to the core BWMP community and then various numbers of men to the named sub-communities. A man can be added to any number of communities. Some of our Barnsley men are in as many as 6 communities because they appear on multiple war memorials, are mentioned on a war memorial gravestone (I have a separate community to keep track of these), and they are named in Jon Cookey's book Barnsley Pals, which is an invaluable source of reference for the 13th and 14th battalions of the York and Lancashire Regiment and which drew most of its men from the Barnsley area.

Using the Search box

Anyone can find one of the Barnsley War Memorials Project's communities on LFWW. Just put the word Barnsley in the search box at the top of the page and click the magnifying glass logo.

Search Results page showing Communities containing the word Barnsley

When the results are returned choose Communities on the left hand side, wait a moment and then you will see all the communities containing that word - they might not all be mine, but you can spot them easily enough, they have the BWMP logo and strapline underneath each one. Currently both Fay Polson (Wombwell and Jump) and I are creating BWMP communities.

A friend recently asked me to set up a community for her local war memorial - remember that only subscribers have the power to do this - and as it is a Barnsley war memorial I was happy to do so as I would have got around to it eventually (I have such a long 'to do' list you wouldn't believe!) Anyway I did and she tried several times over the Christmas holidays to add information to her men, but couldn't quite work out how to do it!

So here's the simple 'how to' for anyone with a free account:

Log on! If you haven't got an account create one now. Nearly 60,000 people have created accounts, and it is quite straight forward. Name, email address and choose a password. And remember your password ...

Once you have logged on you are taken to the Dashboard page. This shows a list of any soldiers you have Remembered and gives some up to date statistics about the site and links to helpful hints and other useful information - like the lists of records available I showed you above.

Find your man! You will need to know a little bit about your man or woman's WW1 career to find them. Name and service number is the best way to do it - a service number can be found on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) website if the person died. If you have WW1 medals the service number will be inscribed on the edge of each medal. Alternatively you can try name and regiment and hope the surname you are searching for isn't too common to pick your man out.

John W Woodward remembered in All Saints Church, Cawthorne

The above is a memorial plaque in Cawthorne Church, it gives us this man's name, regiment, date of death, age and parents' names. Very useful. No service number though. However using his name, initials and date of death I can find him on the CWGC website quite easily. His service number is given there as 3114.

Searching for Woodward 3114 on LFWW does not bring back any results, so now try again with a * in front of the number. Woodward *3114 brings back two possible men and only one is a John W Woodward in the York and Lancaster Regiment, the other is an Ernest Woodward in the Durham Light Infantry. Found him!

Use the filters on the left to narrow down the results

I also tried searching for John Watkin Woodward and got no results, searching for John W Woodward brought back 10 men, but I could filter them by regiment to see only the ones in the York and Lancaster Regiment and that cut it down to 2. Both are unfortunately a Private John W Woodward, with different service numbers, no further information available. If you get to this point and there is no additional information such as date of birth or death on the records you will probably not be able to work out which is your man. So cross your fingers for an unusual surname or uncommon regiment or rank, or go and do a bit more digging in your paperwork for a hint to his service number. If by any chance both (or more than two sometimes) results show the same service number and a similar name, maybe one with full name and one with initials only, these will probably be the same man who has a duplicate medal card because he received an award of some kind, maybe the Military Medal or similar. Alternatively I have heard of men who are listed in both the Army and the Air Force, because they transferred at some point. Whatever ... in that case choose one of the records (if one is being remembered already choose that one) to add your data to. Duplicates are being reported all the time and will be merged at some point in the future.

Our man is the bottom one on the snip above - we know his service number was *3114, you can see that this man's full number is actually 3/3114 and that he is being Remembered by one person.

Click on the name! This will open up the Life Story page on the new Timeline view.

Remember your man! Always do this first. Just click the big turquoise-blue button that says "Remember". This will enable you to find this Life Story again very easily as he will appear listed on your Dashboard page. In this case the Remembered number goes up to 2 to indicate I have been successful. Of course if you are the first person to remember your man it will change from 0 to 1. But you had worked that bit out for yourself hadn't you?

What do you know about this man? Are you going to add a photograph or a story or some other evidence? You cannot add facts about a man (you know I mean man or woman but it is getting tedious to type that all the time so please bear with me!) unless you attach the facts to a piece of evidence. This can be a photo of his gravestone, a scan of his birth certificate (if you own it - not if you have downloaded it from Ancestry or FMP or any other pay per view site as you don't own copyright to the image in that case) or a extract from a document or book that you have seen and can reference.

Let's add a picture - that's pretty straightforward and if we add an image of the memorial plaque I showed you earlier we can then use that as the source of evidence to add his date of death and his parents' names. Bear in mind that once I've done this to show you how to John W Woodward is not going to look the same as he does in my initial snips - we will have 'improved' his Life Story.

An unimproved John Woodward, remembered by 1 person

Select the Images option on the toolbar. It currently says Images 0. If there is no profile picture selected for your man, as in the snip above, you can click directly on the profile box, where the little camera icon appears and that will open up the dialogue box to add an image directly.

Images Dialogue Box

If you go via the Images option route you now need to click on the words "Be the first to to add your own images" or "Upload your own images to this Life Story" which will be in bold font to the right of the page.

In the Images dialogue box click in the box where it says, "Click to upload image ..." and then you will have to browse on your computer to find the image and select it. A little thumbnail image will appear in the box if you are successful. It doesn't work first time on my Samsung Tablet, but then it is an old model, but I can usually get it to do it eventually. On my laptop it works quite straightforwardly.

Now you need to add a caption - in this case I am going to add "Memorial Plaque in All Saint's Church, Cawthorne". The description of the image should be a proper description - imagine that the person viewing this website might have poor eyesight and be having the page read out to them by some special software - you need to say what the picture is with a little bit of imagination. So in this case, "A white marble plaque with black border, commemorating John Watkin Woodward". Don't worry about a complete transcription we can add that later.

If the photo is from a newspaper or you know the date you can add that here too. And finally tick at least one of the boxes to say why this item is connected to your man. In this case I will tick, "Name or other information in the image". You don't have to put anything in the bottom box, but if you tick Other it is nice to explain your reasoning! Think of the other people who will be looking at this record.

Now click Connect to *your man's name* and the job is done.

Dialogue box for this picture

If you clicked in the profile picture box your image will have appeared there automatically, if not you can make it appear there by clicking on the picture and choosing "Set as Profile Picture" from the bottom of the dialogue box.

Add some Facts! We are going to use this evidence to add the date of John's death to his Life Story. Open the image dialogue box by clicking on the picture, and click on "Add Facts from this Evidence".

NOTE! Only add facts which appear in this particular piece of evidence or which can be deduced from the evidence. We can't add his date of birth, but we can have a guess at his year of birth from his age and date of death. To add his full date of birth we will need more evidence.

Dialogue box for adding facts

The dialogue box that opens now is very long - scroll up and down a bit to see all the options. We are going to add facts to just a few of these, but it gives you an idea of other facts that you could add if you can find evidence to support them.

Once you are familiar with the various facts you can jump to a particular one by starting to type its name in the white strip at the top of this box.

We are going to add John's date of death and that is fairly near the top and visible on this snip. Click on the word Death to open up yet another dialogue box.

Dialogue box for entering Death details

We are very lucky in this case that the memorial plaque gives us the place and country in which John died. So I am going to enter Armentieres and France in the first two boxes (Countries are picked from a long list when you click on the box), his date of death is entered as 01 03 1916 and I can also choose "Died of Wounds" from the Nature of Death pick list.

If you don't know any of this information for your man leave the boxes blank. Don't guess, it will make the whole exercise of gathering proper evidence and facts pointless and could mislead future visitors to the site.

Once we have done this click the Continue button.

VERY IMPORTANT SAVE BUTTON!

I would recommend saving between each fact you add, just in case your computer throws a wobbly or you accidentally hit a wrong key somewhere along the way.

Scroll right down to the bottom of the long list of facts that are available to add and you will see a panel headed "Summary of Added/Improved Facts" and at the bottom of that is the very important Save These Facts button.

Click this and the pop up "Thank You" screen Continue button and breath a sign of relief.

You have successfully added information to Lives of the First World War. Well done!

This is what John's Life Story page looks like now - he has a profile picture and his date of death is visible. It will be visible on the search screens too - useful for other users looking for him in future.

John Woodward's improved Life Story with profile picture and date of death

The process for using different kinds of evidence is similar, but you must use the Evidence option to link or reference the External Evidence you have found BEFORE you start to add facts. I know I'm getting a bit heavy on this topic, but it is very important that each fact is supported by its own evidence - it's like providing a trail for people to folllow so that they can look up the same facts as you at any point in the future. You will find you have a choice of website, book/publication/archive or copy of official document. Selecting one of the little round spots (known as radio buttons in the trade) will change the boxes underneath where you add your captions and descriptions and ticky proof boxes to suit the type of evidence you have selected. I hope you can work this out for yourselves as I'm getting a bit tired of typing this afternoon ... but I promise to come back another day and have another go at explaining these boxes and finding and attaching a free record too.

Of course you might just KNOW something about this man from a family story ... in which case you can just click the Stories option on the tool bar on your man's Life Story page, click on "Share it Here" and type away to your heart's content (within the word limit of course!). Any stories to which you add a date will appear on the timeline page in the correct place. Take a look at Edwin Betony, one of my Barnsley War Memorials Project men for an example if you like.

I hope this has helped. Good luck with your research!
And remember the whole purpose of this is to commemorate and honour the men and women who played a role in the First World War - they deserve us to try our best to create this digital memorial - don't let them down!

A couple of days ago I wrote an introduction to using the new Timeline version of Lives of the First World War (LFWW). I said I'd come back and explain how to add External Evidence.

Memorials for WW1 and WW2 in St Mary's Worsbro' Village

I've been adding men from the War Memorial at St Mary's Church, in Worsbrough Village near Barnsley to a Community on LFWW. I was intrigued by the name of one man - listed as Pte T Goodyear of the Conn Rgs on the memorial - the researcher who had submitted his list to me (AB) had written Goodyer? on his spreadsheet as if he wasn't sure about the spelling.

I looked the soldier up on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website and helpfully it gave his wife's name and their home address in Blacker Hill, Barnsley in the Additional Information, so I know I've got the right man. Now confirmed as Timothy Goodyer I decided to add his photo and obituary from the Barnsley Chronicle to LFWW. We did adding pictures in my last post, so this is about adding External Evidence in the form of a transcription of a newspaper cutting.

Timothy Goodyer's Life Story on LFWW

From AB's research and the entry on the CWGC I know that Private Goodyer's service number is 3345. That and his surname are enough to find him on LFWW. I have already added his picture - quite a handsome chap don't you think?

You can see in the highlighted oval "Evidence" that he currently has three pieces of evidence attached, these are the seed data - his Medal Index Card and his CWGC entry, both attached by the Imperial War Museum and the photo, attached by me. I am going to attach the Barnsley Chronicle as my other alter ego, my test user who hasn't got a paid subscription.

The Evidence Page on LFWW

Click on the Evidence button on the toolbar and the page display changes to the Evidence page. Scroll down past the orange Search Records button (that would have taken us to the records that mostly can't be viewed unless you have a paid subscription) to the green Add External Reference button. Click that.

External Reference Dialogue box on LFWW

The External Reference Dialogue box opens.

As you can see I have selected Book/Publication/Archive by clicking the 'radio button' by that phrase. The boxes below will change to suit each kind of evidence.

I have entered 'Barnsley Chronicle' as the Title, and the date of the newspaper report in the Reference box. There is no particular way of doing this - but imagine that you are reading this on someone else's page - you would want to know where to find the report of Pte Goodyer's death.

Location Accessed is Barnsley Archives - who have the entire newspaper available to search digitally - go and visit and have a look! It's very addictive!

The Description should aim to be helpful to someone with poor eyesight who might be viewing this soldier's Life Story via special software that reads out text or to someone who isn't familiar with the source you are attaching.

I haven't ticked the boxes at the bottom yet - but it will be Surname, Military Details and Place I think. His name is mentioned, his regiment and service number are in the report and it gives his home address as Blacker Hill which matches the CWGC entry beautifully.

Then click Connect to *your soldier's name* and Continue on the Thank You pop up and you have added some External Evidence - Well Done!

I am now going to add a transcription of the cutting as a Story linked to this Evidence - I could add the image of the cutting that I have, but as I want to persuade more people to go to Barnsley Archives and to look things up for themselves I'm being a bit stingy with uploading obituaries at the moment. Remember you should only upload images you own or have permission to use for this purpose.

We are still on the Evidence page so scroll back down to your new entry - the title will be displayed above the green button we just used to add the Evidence. Click on the title of the evidence, in this case Barnsley Chronicle, and a new dialogue box opens.

Evidence Reference box on LFWW

This displays the information I just added. You can see that this evidence was connected by Linda Test (the name I gave my non-subscription account).

We could pick facts out of the cutting and add them via the "Add Facts from this Evidence" button, but we did that last time. So this time click the little cog on the bottom right and you will see three options

Challenge this source
Add a story based on this
Remove evidence

If you think someone else has added incorrect information to a soldier's Life Story you can click Challenge this source and submit a report saying why you think it is wrong. Remove evidence is self explanatory - evidence can only be removed by the person who added it by the way.

I am going to add some free text, a transcription of the newspaper cutting, so I chose Add a story based on this. You can add a story using the Stories button on the tool bar without attaching any evidence - this is useful for family stories or rumours about the soldier. But in this instance I am making a direct transcription of the evidence I have in my hand and if someone wanted to see it for themselves they could go along to Barnsley Archives and look it up in the Barnsley Chronicle.

Story Dialogue Box on LFWW

I now have the Story Dialogue Box on screen. You can write whatever you want in here - up to the word limit in the Story box, but it is quite large at 5,000 characters.

I give my story the title "Obituary of Timothy Goodyer in the Barnsley Chronicle" and then start transcribing the cutting in the Story box. This might take some time ...

You can Share (that's the dark turquoise button at the bottom) at any point and come back and add (well they call it "improve") to the story later. I would actually recommend you do this a couple of time if you are typing a long piece especially if you are doing it on a phone or tablet because if your connection fails you will lose what you have written if you haven't saved (Shared) it.

You could transcribe your cutting or write your story in another word processing document and then just cut and paste to here. That works just as well. Beware, if it won't let you save you may have exceeded the word limit and will need to edit a bit or split your story into two parts.

I usually add the Location Barnsley, Yorkshire and the date of the newspaper that the cutting is out of in the bottom section of the box. Any story with a date is displayed in chronological order on the Timeline page - so this is a very useful tool. Note that you can use paragraph breaks in the text, they will display correctly on the Timeline page - the stories look a bit untidy on the Stories page, where the lines all run together, so for the best display always try to add a date so that the story displays on the Timeline.

When you are ready click Share and Continue on the pop up Thank You box.

Change your view to Timeline by clicking on that word on the tool bar just under the profile picture of your man and enjoy your addition to his Life Story.

That's all for now - I think my tea is ready.
Good Luck with your research and keep Remembering the men and women who served in the First World War - they deserve it!

In the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy it is vitally important that you always know where your towel is ... well it seems that in the First World War it was equally important that you always knew where your spoon was. After all, you could eat with a spoon, scrape mud off your boots with a spoon, dig yourself out of a collapsed dugout with a spoon, deflect bullets with a spoon and ... in the event of the ultimate sacrifice ... be identified by your spoon!

I was adding details of one of our (the Barnsley War Memorials Project) men to Lives of the First World War the other night and (as you do) got distracted by the additional documents the Commonwealth War Graves Commission now supplies on the entries for the men.

Concentration document on CWGC for Swift, W (click to enlarge)

The man I was interested in is the second one down, initially listed as an Unknown Soldier of the Yorks & Lancs he was later identified by an inscription on his spoon as 13/890 Pte W Swift of the 13th York and Lancaster, known as the 1st Barnsley Pals:

890 1.B.Y & L.

Lower down the page a second man, Pte R A Wood, of the 2/2 London Regiment was also identified by his spoon. I wonder how common this was?

WW1 spoon bearing the inscription RFC 878 (from the Great War Forum)

I searched online and was able to find this picture of a WW1 spoon on the Great War Forum where there is also a lot of discussion about the spoons.

Walter Swift's Army Service Records have survived (available on Ancestry and Find My Past) and with those and a thorough search of the local newspaper, the Barnsley Chronicle (available to search digitally at Barnsley Archives) I was able to construct an interesting timeline around the spoon.

Walter joins up in September 1914 no doubt carried along in the enthusiasm for creating a Barnsley Pals battalion at the beginning of the war. He was 29 years old. He had married Emily Walker in 1910 and they had two children alive at the time of his death, Elizabeth b.1912 and Walter b.1916. There had been another child, Arthur b.1910 who is listed on the 1911 census when Walter and Emily, living at 16 Park Square, off George's Street in Barnsley, declare they had been married 10 months and that Arthur was 6 months old. Interesting maths that! So Emily had been five months pregnant with Arthur on their marriage. Unfortunately Arthur dies later the same year and is buried in Monk Bretton Cemetery. Another child, Thomas is listed on Walter's Service Records, but he also dies young aged just 11 months in October 1915 and is buried in Barnsley Cemetery. His death certificate is included in Walter's records. Walter would still have been in England at this time, I hope he made it home to console Emily.

Walter went over the top on 1 July 1916 with the rest of the Barnsley lads and was one of the hundreds of casualties from the two local battalions that day.

Barnsley Chronicle 26 August 1916 (thanks to Barnsley Archives)

Nearly two months later his family is officially notified that Walter is missing. The above note appears in the Barnsley Chronicle on 26 August 1916. Similar pieces continued to appear for many weeks after the events of the "Big Push" as it became known in the Chronicle.

Barnsley Chronicle 28 April 1917 (thanks to Barnsley Archives)

The following year the family must have heard more definite news as on two consecutive weeks In Memoriam notices appear for Walter, the first on 21 April 1917 from his mother, (step) father and sisters, and the one I have reproduced above on 28 April 1917, from his wife and children. There is a letter in the Service Records dated July 1917 noting that articles of personal property and medals should be sent to Mrs Emily Swift of 10 Mill Street, Hoyle Mill, Nr Barnsley.

Emily remarries in 1918 to John W Jackson and moves to 52 Princess Street, Barnsley. They appear to have eight children together between 1919 and 1928.

Emily Jackson was sent Walter's British War Medal and Victory medal in January and September 1921 following some letters to and fro to establish her whereabouts in late 1919. Emily completes the Next of Kin form in September 1919, which is wonderful source of family information for any family historian. She gives the full dates of birth of her and Walter's two surviving children and full address details of his mother, step father, and five half sisters, three of them under their married names!

The CWGC document initially shown above is dated July 1921. This must be when this exhumation of bodies from temporary graves to be 'concentrated' into larger cemeteries took place. In the Service Records there is a note dated December 1921 from the Imperial War Graves Commission (the previous name of the CWGC) enquiring of the Infantry Records Office in York:
"890 York & Lancaster Regiment. It is desired to identify a soldier who bore the Regimental Number quoted above. Will you therefore kindly give the full description of any or all the soldiers in your records as having borne this number, and at the same time quote the latest casualty effecting him or them".

Letter to the Imperial War Graves Commission (from Find My Past)

The letter of reply has also been preserved in the records. You can see that the records office had identified five men in the York and Lancaster Regiment whose Service Number contained the digits 890. Three of them had survived the war and been discharged, one had been discharged in March 1915 - his number was 14/890 suggesting he was in the 2nd Barnsley Pals. At this date the Pals were still at home, the 2nd Pals having not even moved out of temporary accommodation in Barnsley centre (see Jon Cooksey's book Barnsley Palsfor much more on the Pals' movements), so this man was probably discharged as unfit for service.

Only 13/890 Pte Swift W was unaccounted for, "Assumed Dead. Place of Burial unknown". I assume the IWGC also considered the place in which the unidentified body had been found and that this tallied with the identification of the body as a man who had fallen on 1 July 1916.

It would have been at this point the red ink correction was made to the Concentration document - and when Pte Swift's cWGC gravestone was engraved his full details were able to appear on it. You can see a low resolution picture of his gravestone on the War Graves Photographic Project's page. There is no family information on Walter's CWGC entry page and no personal dedication on his gravestone. This might be because the Army were having trouble locating his widow, or simply because she did not reply to them when approached.

Letter to Emily Jackson from the Infantry Records Office (from Find My Past)

In February 1923 the saga draws to a close in, to me, a slightly shocking manner. The Infantry Records Office sends "One damaged spoon" to Emily Jackson at Princess Street.

It has been nearly seven years since Walter was reported missing. Emily has remarried and now has at least four children with her new husband. And then a spoon turns up. How upsetting must that have been?

Larger than average terraced property, 52 Princess Street (from Google Maps)

Emily and John William Jackson continue to live at 52 Princess Street for the rest of their lives. They lose two children, Edith aged 5 and Frank aged 4 at the beginning of 1931 who are buried in the same plot as little Thomas Swift (c 270) in Barnsley Cemetery. John dies in 1947 and Emily in 1977 aged 87 years old, they too are buried together in Barnsley Cemetery (6 101) and one day I'll take a walk and see if they have a gravestone. Such a long and sad life - and I wonder what happened to the spoon?

The Barnsley War Memorials Project have just about completed our first volunteers project - to transcribe the 1918 Absent Voters' List for Barnsley and surrounding area. This was compiled following the changes in electoral franchise extending the vote to all men over 21 and to women over 30 who fulfilled certain property requirements. So all servicemen who were over 21 or who would be 21 by the forthcoming General Election in 1918 were registered to vote. You can access the transcriptions from the Absent Voter page of the BWMP website.

There have only been two women found on the list (as far as I am aware). I wrote about one a few months ago, Katherine Blackburn of Sheffield Road, Barnsley, who was a Nurse in the Territorial Force Nursing Service. One of the very last transcriptions to be returned from our volunteers has turned up another, Lucy Hilary Johnson, a Red Cross Nurse.

Extract from the 1918 Absent Voters' List (thanks to Barnsley Archives)

As you can see another person from the same address, 46 Church Street, is also in the forces - Alfred Lancelot Johnson is a Private in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

1911 census snip (from Ancestry)

A search of the 1911 census shows Lucy and Alfred living at 46 Church Street with their widowed mother Margaret and another two sisters. Lucy's occupation was entered as Spinster I think, but it has been rubbed or scratched out. Alfred is listed as a Chemist. Margaret has filled in the details about the length of her marriage and children born to it, even though as a widow she hadn't needed too - in fact the census enumerator has struck the information through with red ink - but it's very useful for us! She had been married for 49 years and borne 10 children, of whom 3 have already died.

The family proved a little elusive in 1901, as it transpired because Margaret and her husband John were away from home on census night. I did find three of their grown up children living at York Terrace, Stairfoot - and cross checking on Ancestry I found that John Johnson was on the Electoral Roll for that address in 1899.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph 13 September 1910 (from Find My Past)

John Johnson died on 12 September 1910 and in the notice above we can see that he had been the Manager of Carlton Main Colliery and had been 71 years old when he died. He left £4737 18s 10d in his will according to the Probate index entry on Ancestry where, as one of his executors, Alfred Lancelot Johnson is referred to as a Chemist's Manager. Margaret died in 1911 and both are buried in Barnsley Cemetery along with sons William Matthew Johnson (d. 1895 aged 31) and Richard Aaron Johnson (d.1894 aged 24). I don't know who the other child who died young is yet - but the family was living in Carlton in 1891 and before that in Halesowen where Alfred was born and Wales where the older children were born so another child could have died in any of these places.

John Johnson and Margaret Parker were both from the North East of England and had married in the June Quarter (April, May, June) of 1861 in the Newcastle upon Tyne district. She was born in around 1839 in Winlaton, just south of the river Tyne in Durham and I have identified her family easily in the 1861 census (7 April 1861) as helpfully her younger sister and brother are living with the Johnson family Wrexham in 1871. Her brother Richard is living next door to them in 1881 in Halesowen too, married to a Welsh girl and with two children. John Johnson, also born around 1839, gives his birthplace as Gosforth, Northumberland in the 1881 and 1891 census returns and was much harder to trace, however he is most probably the son of Matthew Johnson (Matthew being the middle name of two of his sons) who was a Overman in the Colliery in Winlaton in 1851, despite the family reporting their origin as Longbenton, Northumberland (just 2 miles from Gosforth). This does seem to fit nicely with him marrying a girl from Winlaton a few years later.

Their eldest son William Matthew Johnson's death is also reported in the Sheffield newspapers - he had been a Bank Clerk in Sheffield and had died at Crookes in Sheffield in 1895 of typhoid fever aged 31. The report also notes that whilst living at Carlton he had been a Sunday School teacher there, travelling regularly between the village and his employment in Sheffield. Unfortunately the report is spread over two columns of the newspaper and the bottom part of one section is missing on Find My Past.

Despite a good search I can can find no further mentions in the Sheffield papers (which are the nearest that appear on Find My Past as yet) of John Johnson's career - there should be an obituary in the Barnsley Chronicle, so I'll put that on my to do list for next time I visit Barnsley Archives.

40 to 46 Church Street (thanks to the Tasker Trust)

The book, Barnsley Streets Volume 1, states that L H Johnson was living at 46 Church Street from 1906 to 1929. It seems odd that the entry would be in Lucy's name when John and Margaret would have been the senior householders ... but maybe Mr Tasker was just being economical with his records and bundling all the entries under the name of the person who lived there for the longest. All of the houses in the photo above, from the Tasker Trust website, were demolished when the road was widened and a roundabout put in, roughly opposite Barnsley College I estimate from the information in the book.

Lucy was 34 years old in 1911, so when she was listed as a Red Cross Nurse in 1918 she would have been 41, but obviously playing her part in the war and living away from home to do it. In 1915 the War Office proposed that volunteer nurses, known as VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachments) could work in RAMC hospitals (lots more details on the Red Cross website) - I can't find a record for her on Lives of the First World War so maybe she did not work abroad.

Her brother Alfred appears to have been invalided out of the RAMC in 1919 with malaria, at which time he was a Sergeant, according to a detailed Pension Record available for him on Ancestry. A little younger than Lucy, he was 35 years old when he enlisted in April 1916. His occupation was given as Dispensing Chemist and he had dentures fitted! I expect that his peacetime occupation made him a perfect candidate for the Royal Army Medical Corps - and he must have served overseas as he has medal records showing that he was entitled to the British War Medal and Victory Medal.

1955 Probate Entry for Lucy Johnson (from Ancestry)

Both Mary Lizzie and Margaret Dinah Johnson, the sisters who are at home with their mother, Lucy and Alfred in 1911 die unmarried and are buried in Barnsley Cemetery, Margaret in 1921 in Barnsley and Mary in 1838 in Harrogate. Lucy herself dies in 1955 aged 78 years also in Harrogate according to her Probate index entry on Ancestry, but she does not appear to be buried in Barnsley. She leaves £17,424 6s 2d and her executor is Alfred Lancelot Johnson, retired Chemist. That is a substantial amount of money - worth around £300,000 today (there is a handy converter on the National Archives website).

Alfred, possibly the last of the family, dies in Cheshire in 1965 aged 84 - did he marry? I don't know. And I haven't accounted for all of John and Margaret's children yet. There is an elder daughter, Sarah Jane Parker Johnson, b.1861 and more sons, John Matthew Johnson b.1868 and John P Johnson b.1875 who appear in the census returns still to track down.

I'm afraid that is all I have been able to find about the Johnson family so far ... but a search at the Barnsley Archives later this week might turn up something else.

As you have no doubt noticed (ha!) I have been spending a lot of time researching WW1 soldiers recently - well, oddly, delving into one of 'my men' has sent me down a more traditional family history research path over the last week and given me a better understanding of one of Barnsley's old families and institutions, Guests of Market Hill.

Durty O'Dwyers at the top of the Arcade on Market Hill (from Google Maps)

The building that is (last time I looked) a pub called Durty O'Dwyers used to be a grocer's shop called Guests. According to ML, one of the ladies who volunteers with the Barnsley War Memorials Project, "Guests Confectionery was THE shop to patronise if you were well off. Ladies with big hats, long gloves and their pearls used to visit for afternoon tea, this was in the 50's. Sometimes as a treat, [we] used to go in our walking out days."

Major Thomas Guest
from the Illustrated London News

This is Major Thomas H Guest who was remembered on St John's Memorial Tablet in the church in the Barebones area of Barnsley, sadly lost when the church was demolished in the 1960s. This memorial is one I am especially researching as many of the OH's family came from that area.

I found his picture in the Illustrated London News on a special website they have set up to commemorate the First World War - you can search the ILN and eight other magazines from the same company for the years 1914-1919 completely free of charge. There are lots of pictures and contemporary articles about the war and some very amusing old adverts!

Tom Guest, as he is listed on the St John's tablet, features in Jon Cooksey's book, Barnsley Pals, as a genial old soldier, who served in the Boer War, a good leader and who gets on well with his men. The book also cryptically mentions that he was prosperous local grocer - but not being originally from Barnsley (sorry!) the clue in the name didn't leap out at me. He was 41 years old when he was reported missing after the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, a short paragraph stating that he was seen to have been shot in the leg as he led his company into an enemy trench and that there was "still hope". Barnsley Chronicle 15 July 1916

He is a bit of a mystery man, his Commonwealth War Graves entry and reports in the Barnsley Chronicle give very few clues about where he was from or how he came to be an officer in the Barnsley Pals. His medal card on Ancestry tells me that his full name was Thomas Heald Guest and some searching in the old newspapers on Find My Past gave me a good lead.

Tom's memorial at Lower Peover
(from Military Images)

His father, another Thomas Guest, had paid for work to be done to St Oswald's church at Lower Peover (a place I had never heard of before - it is in Cheshire near Knutsford) and for a brass plaque to be placed there in memory of his son (Liverpool Daily Post 10 October 1918).

Some Googling brought back an entry on the Military Images website with a photo of that very brass plaque and accompanying a transcription of the text was the information that Tom was also remembered on the Bloxham School Roll of Honour. The researcher there didn't appear to be having much more luck than me finding out about Tom, but he did mention that Tom was married to a Mabel Ellen Fountain and that they'd lived in Brighton, which suggested that a 1911 census record I'd thought might be Tom was probably correct. There had been a mention of a Mrs Guest in one of the Barnsley Chronicle reports, but I hadn't known if it was his wife or his mother.

From that census return I now knew that he was born in Rusholme, on the outskirts of Manchester and that his wife was from Haigh, in Yorkshire.

A search for the marriage on FreeBMD gave me the year 1905 for Thomas and Mabel's marriage, and differing from the Bloxham information told me that they'd married in the Barnsley area! Interesting ...

1905 Marriage entry for Thomas Guest and Mabel Fountain (from Ancestry)

The marriage took place at Darton parish church on 3 October 1905. Tom's residence is given as Bowden, which is near Altrincham in Cheshire. Both Tom and his father are described as Manufacturers on the marriage certificate and Mabel's father Joseph Fountain (deceased) as a Colliery Owner - this all sounds very posh. Linking in with the plaque I'd already found the marriage was performed by Arthur Guest, Vicar of Lower Peover! But then Mabel and Tom go to live in Brighton, where I found them in 1911 ... so is the link with Barnsley just via his wife?

From FreeBMD

The only birth entry for a Thomas Heald Guest tallies with Tom's age at death of 41 in 1916 and the district of Chorlton includes Rusholme - but of course sending for Tom's birth certificate would cost me £9.25 - drat you General Register Office! The sooner we have a system like Scotland's where the certificates are available cheaply online the better and I for one will be spending a lot more money.

1881 census snip - The Cedars, Lapwing Lane, Didsbury, Lancashire

I could only find one more census entry that fitted the information I had on Tom now. That took me back to 1881 when he was only 6 years old and living in Didsbury, which is about three miles south of Rusholme. Fortunately his name, age, place of birth and father's name and occupation all match what had been already discovered AND - the greatest discovery of all - his father Thomas was born around 1843 in Barnsley! Look at that - he was a Confectionery Manufacturer employing 79 hands. Wow! Tom's mother's name is Mary J and she was born in Patricroft, Lancashire, and he has a sister, Kate, just one year older than him. There is a sister mentioned on the brass plaque at Lower Peover ...

Lancashire OPC site - Marriages in Rusholme

In Lancashire they are lucky enough to have a very good Online Parish Clerk website - these exist across the country, some are good, some are still in the process of collecting and transcribing their records. However searching for "Thomas Guest" on the site soon produced the next step on my journey back in Tom's family history.

Thomas Guest senior had married Mary Jane Heald (so that's where Tom gets his middle name from!) in St James, Rusholme on 23 October 1872 and now I knew Tom's grandfathers' names - yet another Thomas Guest and George James Heald, a Solicitor.

Next step, back to Barnsley looking for a Thomas Guest born in 1843 (ish) whose father is also a Thomas. This journey has strayed a long way from the Somme in 1916, but is getting closer and closer to discovering why Major Tom Guest is remembered with fondness on a memorial in a now lost church in Barnsley.

1861 census snip - 5 Market Hill, Barnsley (from Ancestry)

This census snip from 1861 shows Thomas aged 19, a Grocer's Apprentice, living at 5 Market Hill, Barnsley with his father, Thomas Guest, a Grocer. Checking in Barnsley Streets Volume 3, I found that number 5 later became number 22 and several lovely pictures of Guest's Grocers shop before and after its redevelopment in the 1890s. So Tom's grandfather had been a well known Grocer in Barnsley - maybe Tom came to help out with the business in Barnsley (his grandfather, the elder Thomas shown above, died in 1867 and his uncle George in 1913) in the years between his sojourn in Brighton in 1911 and the start of the war in 1914. Maybe that was how he ended up in the Barnsley Pals.

Guest's Grocers to the right of the newly opened up Arcade (from YOCOCO)

This is a picture of Guest's shop as the building next door was redeveloped and the top of the Arcade opened up to Market Hill, before that there had been a covered passageway into the yard behind.

A snip from the 1889 town plan of Barnsley showing Guest's Yard

Guest's original shop was the large building just below the the covered passageway which is shown in this map from 1889 marked with a X to the right of the R of 'Market Hill' and then leading eastwards from that is a long narrow yard - shown as Guest's Yard - the family even had a street named after them! This is now the Arcade, a neat little covered shopping street leading down to Eldon Street.

Major Tom Guest's story is far from finished, but writing it down like this today has focussed my thoughts and recorded the steps it took me to link this soldier with Barnsley. I have a lot more to write about the Guests and their intermarrying with other well known families in Barnsley like the Fountains and the Hewitts, but that will have to keep for another day.

Thanks for reading!

(This article first appeared in the Spring 2015 edition of Barnsley CAMRA's magazine The BAR)

No 7 Market Hill in 1900 (from YOCOCO)

The pub on Market Hill, Barnsley now known as the Old No 7 and which is the brewery tap for Acorn Brewery, was for many years known as Carter’s No 7 after the family which ran it from 1878 to 1936 as a wine and spirit merchants.

Patriarch Henry Carter was born in Northallerton in 1815 and came to Barnsley at some point before his marriage to Mary Robinson in 1849. His five children, William Henry, Joseph, Mary Jane, Margaret Ann and Matthew were born in Barnsley between 1852 and 1863.

In 1871 Henry is running the Duke of York Inn on Cheapside as a Licensed Victualler, and by the 1881 census he is at No 7 Market Hill as a Wine Merchant with all three of his sons listed as his Assistants. He had lost his wife in 1877 but he lived until 1883, dying at No 7 Market Hill aged 69. They are buried together in Barnsley Cemetery with their married daughter Mary Jane Mantell who died in Sheffield in 1912. According to her entry in the 1911 census she had two children, but both had died young.

Henry Carter senior left £3,500 in his will, worth around £170,000 in today’s money.

Eldest son William Henry Carter was living at No 7 Market Hill in 1901 carrying on the business of Wine & Spirit Merchant. A single man, he had his sister as housekeeper to look after himself and her children who were staying with him. Dorothy Hough, his niece, is listed as his housekeeper in 1911, keeping it in the family might have saved a bit of money!

Dorothy marries Arthur Watkinson in 1916 and has one son; however both father and son die in 1918, this would be in the period of the great influenza epidemic at the end of the First World War. I cannot find her death, so maybe she remarried. His nephew Harry Hough does not go into the family business, he is a Railway Clerk and married with two daughters in the 1911 census.

Henry’s second son Joseph, a Wine & Spirit Merchant of 7 Market Hill, Barnsley had died in January 1901, before the census, aged 47 and unmarried as far as I can tell.

The third of Henry’s sons, Matthew, was carrying on the family name however. He had married in 1895 to Maude Schofield and had four children, Henry, Joseph Robinson, Matthew Schofield and Mary by 1901 when he was living at 109 Dodworth Road, but still apparently employed in the family business. There were two more children by 1911, both daughters, Maude and Marjorie.

Barnsley Chronicle 10 June 1916
(thanks to Barnsley Archives)

Matthew’s eldest son Henry was not listed on the 1911 census, aged 15 he was probably away at school, as we know he attended St Cuthbert’s College, Worksop. Showing his loyalty to his old school, Henry joined the St Cuthbert’s Squad of the Lincolnshire Regiment on 21 September 1914 shortly after the First World War broke out. He had intended to be an electrical engineer and at the time of his enlistment had been an apprentice at Messrs Thos. Taylor & Sons, Barnsley. He had been a good cricketer and had played for Barnsley’s second team. Henry had also regularly sung in St George’s Church Choir.

Harry, as he was known locally, was sent to France in November 1915 and was due for leave when unfortunately he was killed on 30 May 1916. The Barnsley Chronicle published this letter from his Company Commander on 10 June 1916, “He died at his post, being hit by shrapnel. I especially feel his death as I am an old Worksop boy myself.”

It was reported that Private Griffiths heard him call after a “whizz-bang” burst, and rushed to catch him as he fell. He was unconscious from the time he was hit and died half an hour afterwards. He is buried in Becourt Military Cemetery in the Somme, France. The article notes that “the deceased would have been 21 years of age next August”.

Barnsley Chronicle 11 November 1916
(thanks to Barnsley Archives)

Second son Joseph Robinson (named for his grandmother we can assume) had also joined the army and at the time of his brother’s death was in training at Cannock Chase with the York & Lancaster Regiment. He was transferred to the West Yorkshire Regiment and must have been sent out to France shortly afterwards as he was reported missing in a Barnsley Chronicle piece on 4 November 1916. Born in 1897 he can only just have been old enough to serve abroad as the age limit in 1916 was 19 years old.

His body must have been found later as he is buried in the Connaught Cemetery, Thiepval, in France and his date of death is given as 28 September 1916.

Matthew Carter had now lost his two older sons, he also loses his youngest daughter Marjorie in 1923, aged just 25.

We know that the Carter family name remained above the No. 7 until 1936 and this fits exactly with the death of Matthew’s his third and last son, Matthew Schofield (named for his mother) Carter in 1936 just 5 years after his father. Neither Matthew senior nor his son leave a great deal in their wills, so the business still seems to be in the hands of William Henry Carter who must surely have retired as he was 85 years old and living at 49 Sackville Street when he died in 1937. He left £23,620 in his will, or around £870,000 in today’s money. This does suggest that he sold the business as there were no “Sons” left to pass it on to.

Henry’s remaining daughter and William Henry’s sister, the widowed Margaret Ann Hough remains at 49 Sackville Street until her death in 1942, but she too leaves very little in her will. So where did the family fortune go?

Both Carter sons are remembered on the Barnsley Grammar School Old Boys’ War Memorial now on display in the Cooper Art Gallery. Harry Carter, presumably because he had been a chorister there, was also remembered on the Barnsley, St George's Church, Memorial Plaque which was lost when the church was demolished.

The Barnsley War Memorials Project has now been underway for just over a year (from the official constitution of the group in March 2014) and we have collected hundreds of photographs and transcriptions of local war memorials in our work towards our initial aim of creating a First World War Roll of Honour for Barnsley.

The three folders containing our war memorial index in Barnsley Archives

From more than 500 war memorials, including over 300 war memorial gravestones, we now have to create a list of unique names - that is we have to work out who each man IS in order to eliminate duplicates. You might be surprised to learn that many men are listed on more than one memorial - and I don't just mean the one in their local church and on their parents' gravestone. It is a particularly common occurrence amongst the officer classes, my best guess being that when a church memorial was being planned and the committee were asking who should be commemorated the names of well known local officers were put forward by the men who had returned and remembered them with fondness and respect.

Another problem is a small number of men on each memorial whom we have been unable to identify by the usual routes. Generally a search of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission pages and of Soldiers Died in the Great War (available free on Ancestry in local libraries and on Find My Past as pay-per-view) finds 80% of the men named. A few more are traced by a search of the local newspapers - the Barnsley Chronicle is indexed by soldiers' names to the beginning of 1917 in Barnsley Archives and the whole newspaper is also available digitally to search month by month. The Barnsley Independent and the South Yorkshire Times also provide photographs and obituaries during the war years - these are available to search on microfilm in Barnsley Archives.

Sometimes, though, we are just unable to work out who a name on a church or roadside memorial refers to. This is where we need the help of dedicated local researchers.

As well as helping collate the lists of names, photographing and transcribing memorials and recently the 1918 Absent Voters' List many of our volunteers have a particular memorial which they are researching in depth - in fact it is often the way that that they were doing this FIRST and then come on board with the BWMP later, offering us the benefit of their local expertise and research skills.

1918 panel on St Luke's war memorial

I am researching the memorial at St Luke's Worsbro' Common and also the memorial which used to be in St John's Church in the Barebones area of Barnsley, sadly lost when the church was demolished in the 1960s.

These parishes are adjacent to each other, and many members of the OH's family (my husband's family) lived in the densely packed houses in those areas. In fact we (the OH and I) lived in that area ourselves until very recently.

One man who has been 'causing me trouble', on the St Luke's memorial is J Brannon. Helpfully the memorial at Worsbro' Common is sorted into lists by year of death, and J Brannon appears on the panel for 1918. Although I have found two Brannon/Brannan families and some miscellaneous lodgers in Barnsley with men of the right age to have served in the war there is only one J Brannon/Brannan listed on the CWGC and SDGW with Barnsley connections. This is a James Brannan who was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, enlisted in Barnsley and was reported missing in August/September 1915 in Gallipolli.

His parents were Michael and Julia Brannon/Brannan (it depends which census you read) who lived on Joseph Street and Raywood Row in St John's parish in the census returns of 1881, 1891 and 1911. I have found a newspaper report from 1916 where his death in 1915 is confirmed to his mother - still on Raywood Row and from where she is buried in 1925. There is no family connection with Worsbro' Common. At least three men with this surname appear on the 1918 Absent Voters' List in the St John's area. Michael Brannon is his nephew (very likely) and Thomas (probably) and Bartholomew Brannon (definitely) are his brothers - all these men survive the war.

If only we had the Absent Voters' List for Worsbro' Common, a man killed in 1918 would appear on it, but unfortunately it does not exist in the same detail as the Barnsley one and is only available at Wakefield Record Office.

All this research has not been a waste of time however - as linking the names and places I have discovered along the way have enabled me to make a connection that might not otherwise have occurred to me.

Snip from Barnsley Chronicle 24 September 1921
(thanks to Barnsley Archives)

In the absence of the actual memorial from St John's I have been working from a list of names published in the Barnsley Chronicle in 1921.

Last night I noticed that although most of the names are listed alphabetically that of one of my unknown men on that memorial, James Barman, is out of order. He falls between John Bird and Harry Brown - what if this is a mistake on the part of the Chronicle reporter and the name should be James Brannan? That fits much better in the alphabetical list. There is a Frederick Barman on the list too - but I found him long ago - he has a younger brother called James William after their father, who would only have been 19 at the end of the war, but a man of that name whose age fits dies in Barnsley in 1962, so that seems to eliminate him.

My suggestion is that it is James Brannon/Brannan from Raywood Row who was remembered on the St John's memorial but that he is not the same man as the J Brannon listed on the St Luke's memorial, due to the discrepancy of year of death and the lack of connection to that parish in that Brannon/Brannan family.

Which leaves us with the problem of J Brannon killed in 1918, somehow connected to St Luke's, Worsbro' Common. J could be John or James or Joseph ... the search on Find My Past's SDGW page lets me search on J* Brann*n who was killed in 1918 and I have 17 hits to check out. So far none appear to be connected to Barnsley, let alone Worsbro' Common!

I have started a new page on the Barnsley War Memorials Project website for listing the men who we are currently unable to positively identify - more will be added as each memorial is merged into our master list. You can access the page via the link I have given or by clicking on the Unidentified Men tab on the website.

Please visit our website and take a look - your information could help us identify these men!
Thank you.

On a Wednesday I usually attend the Cudworth History and Heritage Group meeting at Cudworth Library (aka Cudworth Centre of Excellence) but this morning the bright, if cold and windy, day inspired me to try my first solo adventure of the year.

Since solving the mystery of the OH's great-grandmother Edith Alice in 2009 and discovering the family links to Hemsworth we have visited the village (small town?) on several occasions. A new Wetherspoon's pub opened there two years ago, to which the OH regularly delivers his Barnsley CAMRA magazines and there is a handy Tesco store when the one at Stairfoot runs out of cat litter (the only thing we regularly buy at Tesco to be honest). I have a file of photos from January 2010 which includes photos of the outside of St Helen's Church, the memorial at Kinsley to both World Wars and the new looking memorial in Hemsworth to the Second World War. But it has taken until just recently to ascertain that there is, in St Helen's Church, a memorial to the First World War.

St Helen's, Hemsworth (photo taken January 2010)

One of the problems has been gaining access to the church, which opens only for services and a coffee morning on a Wednesday. I have been reluctant to miss the Cudworth LLHG meeting to make the 45 minute each way trek on the bus (via Shafton, ASOS, Grimethorpe, Brierley and all points east) to Hemsworth as it would, and indeed did, take all morning.

Memorial to the Men of Hemsworth in St Helen's Church (photographed 1 April 2015)

However, it was worth it! As you can see above (click the photo for a larger view) there is a large memorial in the Lady Chapel of the church. It consists of a separate header reading, "1914 To the Glory of God and in Undying Memory of the Men of This Parish who gave their Lives for King and Country 1918", and then underneath four separate wooden panels each listing 40+ names. I make it a total of 173 names - but that was a quick count on my screen, I haven't tried transcribing the names yet.

Lady Chapel of St Helen's, Hemsworth (from the church website)

This is where the panels are in the church, look in the middle distance on the right hand wall - the photo above is from the church's own website - but I'm sure they won't mind, they were very friendly this morning when I explained that I was looking for my husband's Pagett soldier cousin. One gentleman even remembered an elderly lady called Pagett in the 1960s and we wondered if she might have been a relative.

Albert Pagett 1889 - 1915 remembered

This is a close up of the third panel where Albert Pagett is listed. He is actually the OH's 3x great uncle, being brother to his great, great grandmother Minnie, mother of the Edith Alice mentioned at the start of this post.

Albert Pagett must have joined up shortly after the start of the First World War as he arrived, according to his medal card, in the Balkans - part of the Gallipoli campaign - with the Connaught Rangers on 21 July 1915. His brothers Will and Enoch also served in the war, but they returned home to Hemsworth.

Snip from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website

Albert died of wounds on 13 September 1915 and is buried in Portianos Military Cemetery on the island of Lemnos, Greece where there were several military hospitals. Presumably Albert was evacuated from Gallipoli to a hospital where he subsequently died. He was 26 years old.

So, there we are, another WW1 ancestor commemorated. It is a special year of remembrance for the Gallipoli campaign, as it was 100 years ago on 23 February 1915 that the first landing was made there. Thousands of men lost their lives in that campaign - and Albert Pagett from Hemsworth was one of them.

Edit 4 Apr 2015: I have since created a page for this memorial on the Barnsley War Memorials Project website; there are 172 names (told you it was a rough count!) which I have transcribed.

Last week I started to add the handwritten notes in the 'Office Copy' of the 1918 Absent Voters' List for Barnsley to the transcription of the 6127 names which has been completed by 10 volunteers working under the Barnsley War Memorials Project banner.

I had intended to start this the week before, unfortunately, as frequently happens to me I am afraid, I was too ill to leave my bed, let alone travel to Barnsley Archives for a morning's research. I did try to send my apologies via email and Facebook but I don't think any of the ladies gathered at the Archives checked those facilities during the morning, so I am sorry if I let anyone down.

A snip from my Excel spreadsheet recording the notes

The past two weeks have been eventful and so each of my sessions on this new sub-project have been shortened from my usual 10am to 1pm. However I have managed to transcribe 9 pages of the handwritten notes so far, each page containing 45 to 50 names. There are 132 pages in the whole book so at this rate it is going to take me about 30 weeks to complete the task. I am sure that it will take longer, as other more urgent problems and queries are bound to crop up over the next few months. Unfortunately as the handwritten notes are on a facing page to the typed information which we have already transcribed - and the typed pages also contain amendments written in red ink which I am also noting - it seems unlikely that we would be able to photograph the full two page spread in sufficient detail to enable other home-based volunteers to assist in this. However if anyone wants to have a go in the Archives (just not on a Thursday morning please!) please do, I would be happy to work out some system whereby we can do this co-operatively.

A long time ago, October 2012 according to the create date on the appropriate spreadsheet, I started looking at Prisoners of War from Barnsley in the First World War and in June 2013 I did a quick survey of the Absent Voters' List recording the men listed as 'Pris of War' etc in the handwritten notes. I found 141 names, with the usual details of rank, regiment and service number. I now realise that a few of these are actually guards at Prisoner of War camps - not prisoners themselves! My only excuse for this is that notes are quite brief, usually abbrieviated so it takes a little while (and some cross checking) to work out what they actually mean in a number of cases. In the course of that survey I discovered that the handwritten notes do NOT cover the whole book, there are 14 blank pages in three distinct chunks. So that reduces the total amount of pages I have to transcribe to 118 and saves me a couple of weeks' work - but such a shame that the document is not complete for those 45(ish) x 14 men, around 630 names.

Some people have asked me how the Absent Voters' List can help us identify the men who fell in the war as of course it lists living men. The list was compiled in the period winter 1917/1918 when names were collected from families in Barnsley who had men (and 4 women) who would have been eligible to vote in the forthcoming December 1918 election. As the war still had nearly a year to run a number of the men recorded were subsequently discharged through injury, wounds or sickness (there is one in the snip above) or were killed in action or are simply recorded as dead - which may mean they died out of service, or possibly in service, just not killed in action - more checking needed again. The discharge of a man might indicate wounds or war related sickness which later caused their death AND if they died before 31 August 1921 they would have been eligible for a Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) entry ... so each of these names might indicate a casualty too.

Joseph Ambler's gravestone, Barnsley Cemetery

Last week on 4 pages I found:
Dead                   2
Killed in Action    2
Missing               2
Discharged         4
Prisoner of War   4

This week on 5 pages I found:
Dead                  5
Killed in Action    4
Missing               3
Discharged        9
Prisoner of War 3

I have had time to look more closely at some of the men I identified last week.

One of the men noted as 'Dead" was Joseph Ambler, 188428, Royal Garrison Artillery. He is buried in Barnsley Cemetery with a CWGC gravestone and listed on Soldiers Died in the Great War (SDGW) on Ancestry as 'Died of Wounds'. He is remembered on the Oak Plaque at St Peter's Church on Doncaster Road, Barnsley.

Snip from John H Carr's RAF record (Find My Past)

The second man indicated as 'Dead' in my first week of research was John Henry Carr, an Airman in the Royal Air Force. He appears to have died after his transfer to the reserve in 1919 - there is a note on his RAF records on Find My Past which appears to read deceased (or possibly discharged dead?) on 30 July 1920 (see above). However I can find no evidence showing him buried in Barnsley or even a death index entry on FreeBMD for a John Henry or a John H Carr in 1919 or 1920 - there are several John Carr entries, but none the right age or in Barnsley. So he's a mystery!

One of men noted as 'Killed' was John Henry Carr's son Richard, 142754, Machine Gun Corps. His SDGW entry states that he was killed in action on 29 April 1918, and the CWGC notes that he is remembered on the Tyne Cot memorial. He does not appear to be remembered on any Barnsley war memorial that has been recorded so far. The family was from Hunslet, near Leeds, so there is the possibility he is remembered in that area. He was baptised at St Jude's, Hunslet in 1900 (available on Ancestry), unfortunately a Google search shows that this church closed in the 1950s and has been demolished.

The final 'Killed' entry on my first week of transcription was Samuel Musgrave, 40472, Leicestershire Regiment. He was killed in action on 15 August 1918 and is remembered on the war memorial plaque in St Peter's too.

I also checked the 'Missing' and 'Discharged' men for CWGC entries. There was only one, Frederick Bassett, 44565, Lincolnshire Regiment, killed in action on 17 April 1918. He is not remembered on any Barnsley memorial but his CWGC entry notes that his name on the Tyne Cot memorial. It also tells us that his father, another Frederick Bassett, lived at 22 Grasmere Road, Barnsley, which agrees with the entry on the Absent Voters' List.

Somy grand total for just one week's work is two men from Barnsley not remembered on a memorial, two who had already been recorded because they are on a memorial and one more who might be eligible for an entry if we can work out where, when and how he died.

I know the this seems like a lot of work for very little return - but how else would we have discovered that Richard Carr was from Barnsley? He does not appear to be mentioned in the Barnsley Chronicle and his CWGC entry has no additional information to help identify him. We do need to use every resource we can find to track down these fallen men ... and corroboration of facts we already have is not a waste of time - it does prove that our first identification of the men was correct.

Anyway, it keeps me off the streets! And I enjoy it to be honest - the transcription exercise in Barnsley Archives is quite soothing and methodical and then I get a week to hunt down the men I have identified using all the genealogical know-how I've built up over the past 20 odd years, and I can do that at home, from my bed even if I'm poorly. *happy smile*

Last week I was given a copy of a new book, Parishioners of Elsecar who Laid Down Their Lives in the Great War, 1914-1918"by its author, Graham Noble, which takes for its starting point the 32 men named on the First World War Memorial plaque in the Holy Trinity Church, Elsecar.. With the assistance of the Elsecar Family History Group a limited number of copies have been printed, but as one has also been given to Barnsley Archives you will be able to consult it there.

The cover of the new book about Elsecar's Fallen

As it was Easter weekend I actually had the OH to myself for a few days and as I had promised that I would visit the church in Elsecar as a thank you for the book he said he'd drive me down on Bank Holiday Monday and we'd have a look around the churchyard too.

Every Monday Holy Trinity Church, Elsecar is open between 10.30am and 2.30pm for visitors to look around and to consult the vast array of local history and church records they have stored there. Tea and coffee is also available!

I had been my reading copy of the book avidly and love the way it is laid out chronologically, intertwining the stories of the men with the greater story of the war. There are maps of battlefields and lots of pictures. Nine of the 32 men named on the memorial plaque have their photos in the book, thanks to donations by relatives. I am sure the church would love to hear from relatives of the the other men too. It has so far not been possible to identify two of the men - H Read and E Turner. Can you help?

The index page of the book

At the back of the book there are additional stories about men not named on the plaque who are either buried or remembered in the churchyard, or who have been discovered to have some connection to Elsecar, maybe being born there or having family from there. There are reproductions of the memorial postcards from two Elsecar Working Men's Clubs and the lists of men who served from each club, these include many who returned from the war. Finally, a list I had not seen before, from Earl Fitzwilliam's Elsecar Collieries Ambulance Class, which was held in Elsecar Market Hall (now Milton Hall I assume?) from which 43 members had enlisted by November 1915. A piece in the Barnsley Chronicle reported that a total of 472 men had enlisted from the Elsecar Collieries by this time - bear in mind that these would all be volunteers as conscription did not commence until the following year.

At the church the OH was greeted by a gentleman who recognised him from the CAMRA beer festivals that are held in Elsecar, and we were offered refreshments. I enquired about the information they hold and was shown a large cupboard full of well labelled folders. The Memorial Inscriptions are in yellow folders and cover both churchyards, old and new, and the cemetery adjacent to the church.

I was able to scan through two of the books, the ones for the new churchyard and identify seven potential memorial gravestones, only one of which I had been aware of previously. On my visit at about the same time last year I photographed just three memorials, one in each area of the burial grounds. How on earth had I missed this treasure trove?

A photo of the New Churchyard at Elsecar from my previous visit in April 2014

After a look around the church - the stained glass windows are also a memorial to the Fallen of WW1 - and signing the visitors' book, we ventured across the road to the new Churchyard. The OH had captured the plan of the plots from the back of one of the folders on his phone camera as my sketched diagrams seemed unlikely to help too much in our search! Well, I wasn't expecting to be looking for so many gravestones.

Unfortunately the reasons for me not finding some of the other men soon became apparent. Reginald Naylor (killed in action 6 November 1917) is remembered on a kerbstone and it will take another visit with a spade or trowel to remove sufficient grass to be able to photograph his memorial. Clifford Portman's family gravestone (he died of wounds on 28 September 1917) and Wilfred Hirst's family gravestone (died in hospital in France on 2 April 1918) have both fallen on their faces across the grave plots. Poor Percy Turner's family gravestone (killed in action on 15 April 1918) if still intact, now lies beneath a hedge at the back of the churchyard. But my only excuse for not finding Ernest Whittlestone's memorial is that the ground at the very bottom of the churchyard was very boggy last year, so I did not venture that far, because, now I know what I'm looking for I can actually see it on the left of the photo above that I took last year over the churchyard wall!

The OH's picture of Fitz Leach's gravestone,
with the church in the background

We also found two WW2 war memorial gravestones, only one of which I had been aware of previously, and photographed a stone in the older part of the churchyard which appears in the book, Fritz Harry Leach (killed in action 23 April 1917) which I really should have seen on my last visit.

Ah, well, the OH's pictures with his 'proper' camera are always so much better than mine anyway, so it was well worth the trip. And it was a lovely sunny day as you can see in this photo on the left, which includes some rather scary 'weeping angels' (if you follow Dr Who you'll know what I mean!) at the bottom end of the old churchyard.

I have added the names and information to an index page for Elsecar's War Memorial Gravestones and hopefully either myself or ML will be able to add individual pages with more information in the fullness of time.

Thank you for reading.

Although I spend much of my time, at the moment, studying First World War soldiers sometimes I come across a story so good that I have to do a little extra research and then pass it on to you. You may find it interesting, it may inspire you to do some research of your own in a similar area, but whatever the outcome I can assure you that find these 'side' stories great fun to write.

Australian Imperial Force badge from Digger History

A few days ago the Australian Imperial Force seed data was added to Lives of the First World War. I am a member of a Facebook group for 'Community Curators', in other words a bunch of us who spend far too much time on LFWW can now chat and share moans and helpful hints about our favourite(!) website. LFWW don't seem to officially notify their customers when a new record set is added but between us someone usually notices. We have been waiting for Australia records for a long time - many young working class men left Britain in the decade before the First World War for a 'better life' in Canada or Australia, but when the war started they signed up to serve their home country. If they fell, and so many did, their families chose to remember them on memorials in their home towns, I would estimate that each Barnsley memorial has one or two of these Commonwealth men listed.

I am researching the war memorial at St Luke's, Worsbro' Common in depth and if you follow that link you will see a photo and full transcription of the names, there is also a link to my LFWW Community for the men of the area. Worsborough Common (the spelling varies and the abbreviated version is often used) is close to where we used to live on the edge of Barnsley town centre and there was the chance that some of the OH's relatives would appear on it or be connected to it as a large branch of his family tree passes through the area in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William Malkin is the man named on this memorial whom I had flagged up as serving in the Australian forces; his family had lived in Ward Green, Worsborough Bridge for several generations and on the 1901 census he is living with his parents, William and Hannah, and he gives his occupation as Pony Driver Pit. He was 17 years of age, therefore born in 1884. His father was also a Coal Miner.

William was killed in Belgium on 28 September 1916. The additional information on his Commonwealth War Graves Commission entry states that he was the, 'Husband of Frances Mary Jeffs (Formerly Malkin), of 27, Caxton St., Barnsley, England. Native of Worsborough, Yorks, England.' Yet once I began to investigate the records linked by LFWW things began to become a little bit mysterious.

Logo from the header of the Discovering Anzacs website

LFWW have used data from the National Archives of Australia and in particular a site called Discovering Anzacs. The full service records for the soldiers are available to view, similar to the ones we see here on Ancestry for British soldiers, but in this case completely free! A link on William Malkin's Life Story on LFWW took me directly to his records where there were twenty nine pages to read!

A snip from William Malkin's attestation papers (from Discovering Anzacs)

William Malkin enlisted in New South Wales in August 1915 giving his occupation as Miner and his age as either 25 or 35 on two separate copies of his attestation form (I suppose one of these could be a clerical error) neither of which agree with his known age from the census and naming his mother Hannah Malkin of Ward Green, Barnsley as his next of kin. I found this odd considering the additional information on his CWGC entry, but then I found several letters referring to his wife. It seemed that she had got in touch with the Australian authorities in August 1916 claiming to be William's next of kin, but that she had not supplied any documentary evidence - her marriage lines are mentioned - to support her claim. One letter notes that, "she states they have corresponded recently, and quotes his regimental description". The authorities appear to accept her claim despite a discrepancy in "her description of the man ... [and] a difference of six years [in his age]." Why did William lie about his age - was he trying to appear younger so that he could sign up, if the age of 25 years and 5 months given on one form is correct? Why does he not mention that he is married? He specifically answers the question about marriage in the negative!

Obituary from the Barnsley Chronicle 28 October 1916 (with thanks to Barnsley Archives)

Sadly William was killed in September 1916 and is buried in the Railway Dugouts Burial Ground near Ypres in Belgium. His obituary in the Barnsley Chronicle mentions that he emigrated to Australia 'about seven years ago' - so in 1909 then - and notes his mother's name and address. It does give a separate address for William, which may be a clue!

I decided to try to find out more about Frances Mary Malkin (later Jeffs) to see if I could work out if indeed they were married, if so why did he leave her and go to Australia, when did she remarry, did she have any children and what happened to her after the war. I find the stories of the women left behind in Barnsley (well anywhere I suppose) even more fascinating than the military history of the war itself. There is very little written about how women coped without their menfolk and what strategies they used to cope during the difficult and stressful war years.

What I found was quite surprising ... but this post is long enough - I'll tell you more in my next! Thanks for reading.

This last weekend the OH and I travelled down to London to attend a Great British Beer Festival meeting in Fuller's Brewery, Chiswick. As it is such a long journey we usually stay overnight in London, but due to the clash of dates with the London Marathon the nearest affordable accommodation we could find was in Borehamwood. The cost of the room for two nights, parking and train fares to and from London were less than the cheapest room we could find in the centre of London! Unfortunately it did make for a very long day on Saturday, made worse by both of us falling asleep on the Piccadilly Line from Hammersmith and ending up somewhere called Turnpike Lane instead of getting off at St Pancras! Oops!

As a result I am very, very tired - I managed the household stuff yesterday and last night the OH took me to the cinema in Barnsley (Monday is £5 night) to see the new Avengers film, but again that made for a long day, so today I gave up and stayed in bed.

Anyway, to continue from the story I wrote last week about William Malkin, the Barnsley man who left his wife behind when he emigrated to Australia.

Frances Mary Malkin had contacted the Australian military authorities in August 1916 claiming to be William's next of kin, but she did not show her 'marriage lines' as proof. It is so easy for us today, a quick search on FreeBMD shows that William Malkin married Frances Mary Bailey in the June Quarter of 1902. Even more handily the new Yorkshire Marriages on Find My Past include marriages for Worsborough (presumably St Mary's Worsborough) from 1742 to 1912 and I was able to find an image of the actual marriage entry for William and Frances' marriage.

Marriage 26 June 1902 Worsborough Parish Church (from Find My Past)

What was surprising when I found this was the age and class difference between William and Frances. He is the 18 year old Labourer son of a Miner and she is the 30 year old daughter of a Draper - which suggests a solid upper working class, if not middle class background to me. Now knowing that I needed to look in the Worsborough parish records, which are not on Ancestry, I searched various spreadsheets that I have collected over the years and found a entry for the baptism of William and Frances's only child - Clifton Trevor Malkin - at St Thomas' Church in Worsbro' Dale in December 1903. This child, listed simply as Trevor Malkin, aged 7, is living with William Malkin snr, his grandfather, in Ward Green in the 1911 census. So William jnr and Frances may have parted company, but her in-laws were helping Frances by providing care for her son. Clifton Trevor Malkin appears in the Australian service records, confusingly referred to as William's stepson, when Frances is granted a pension after William's death.

I looked back in the census, helped by now knowing Frances' age and father's name. She appears in the 1911 census, boarding with a family called Wraith on Pontefract Road, Barnsley, her occupation is given as Health Visitor for Barnsley Council and she says she was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool. With her birthplace too, I sure I have found the right family in the earlier census returns.

1891 Census for the Bailey family, Hoole in Chester (from Ancestry)

I can find neither William nor Frances in 1901, but in 1891 she appears with her family, living in Hoole in Chester. Father Benjamin Bailey is a Draper and was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire (well, there's a good link) in around 1842, his wife Mary is from Bath. They have two children born in Liverpool, including Frances Mary and the others are born in Chester. Ten years previously the family was already in Chester, but ten years before that, in 1871, Benjamin Bailey, a married man was lodging in Toxteth Park, Liverpool and states that he was born in Mapplewell. His wife is not with him, and I can't positively identify her elsewhere, but FreeBMD shows Benjamin Bailey marrying Mary Williams in Liverpool in the September Quarter of 1870. Frances' baptism in St Peter's Liverpool (also found on Ancestry) gives her date of birth 25 May 1871 so maybe her mother was staying with friends in her late pregnancy while Benjamin was working and has not been enumerated correctly.

Marriage 14 November 1916 at St Mary's, Barnsley (from Ancestry)

The next thing that was easy to find for Frances was her remarriage in November 1916 to Joseph Henry Jeffs at St Mary's Church in Barnsley in the West Yorkshire records on Ancestry. Joseph Jeffs was a Police Constable and was also twelve years the junior of Frances Mary - who does not give any occupation on the marriage entry. She now says her father is deceased and that he was a Silk Mercer and Linen Draper. We still don't know how she got from Hoole in Chester to Barnsley, but neither of her marriages appear to have members of her family standing as witnesses.

I did notice - as it was so unusual - that she gives her occupation as Health Visitor in 1911. So on my next visit to Barnsley Archives I searched the Barnsley Chronicle for mentions of Malkin particularly looking for Frances Malkin or F M Malkin or even Frances Jeffs. The digital version of the Chronicle can be searched by name, but only one month at a time, so it does take ages to look through just a few years. However I was very lucky as in 1918 I found a piece that gave me dates to work to and lots of other information.

Barnsley Chronicle 4 May 1918 (with thanks to Barnsley Archives)

The article is about the resignation of Mrs Frances M Jeffs of Caxton Street, tallying only the name but also in the address to the information given on William Malkin's Commonwealth War Graves Commission entry. It seems Frances had worked for Barnsley Council for ten years as a health visitor and supervising midwife and that she had been the first health visitor to be appointed in the borough. This gave me a suggested date for her taking the post in Barnsley around 1908. More on that in a moment ... The helpful article also tells us that she trained at Shrewsbury Infirmary and later worked in Staffordshire - maybe that was where she was in 1901? She held a certificate of the Central Midwives' Board - a bit of Googling showed that midwives only started to be certified in 1902.

It seemed likely that the appointment of a Health Visitor would have been important in Barnsley, so I searched the Council Minutes for 1908 (which are typed up summaries of all the various Council Committees bound into one volume per year). The Sanitary Committee decided in March 1908 to appoint a Lady Visitor "in consequence of the great infant mortality in the Borough". Cross checking against the Chronicle again I found a report from the Sanitary Committee which stated that the general death rate in the Borough was 18.46 per thousand compared to an average in England and Wales of 15 per thousand, and that the high death rate in Barnsley, "was principally due to the excessive infantile mortality, which worked out at 155 per thousand". (Barnsley Chronicle 11 April 1908) One of the councillors had also commented that it was not altogether improper feeding that was to blame, but, "in many cases it was want of any feeding at all", and that he hoped a Lady Visitor would be able to assist in getting help for cases like this from charities which he considered more important than teaching the mothers how to feed the children. What an assessment of the state of affairs in Barnsley at the time!

Barnsley Chronicle 18 April 1908 (thanks to Barnsley Archives)

This is the advertisement in the following week's edition of the Barnsley Chronicle for the post of Lady Visitor. Applicants need to have Nursing and Midwife's Certificates and would be paid £65 per year with an extra £5 for uniform.

The Sanitary Committee minutes for April note that, "Mrs Malkin, of Ward Green" was to be appointed. This means that Frances Mary Malkin must have obtained her nursing and midwives qualifications before 1908, and her midwife's certificate between 1902 and 1908, as we know there was no certification before that. It seems very unlikely that she continued to work as a nurse after her marriage to William, most women had to resign their positions when they chose to marry in those unenlightened times. Had she used her nursing skills to work as a midwife after her marriage to supplement the family income? Even if she did not have her certificate to start with it was legal to practice under the supervision of a doctor. Maybe she took the exams later? There are midwives'records at TNA but none are available online. I did find an index entry for Frances Mary Jeffs in the 1920 Midwives Roll on Family Relatives.com, but I would have had to have bought an expensive subscription to see the image.

I can see parallels with my own story in Frances' life. I did not do well in my exams at school, but later in life, when my first husband was unable to find work on a regular basis, I began to train as a Radiographer in Sheffield. My then husband did not like being a house husband, so he went back to work whenever he could, his mother looking after our two little children for us. After the first year of my training he became so aggrieved that he asked me to give it all up and to come home to be a full time wife and mother again. I refused to waste the time and effort that I'd put in up to that point seeing the chance of a professional career as a good way to better myself and provide for my children so consequently our marriage broke down.

Did Frances, a trained nurse, regret her possibly hasty marriage to the much younger William, a Coal Miner with few prospects? Did Frances obtaining a good job as 'Lady Visitor' finally break down their marriage to the extent that William emigrated to Australia to seek his fortune the following year? - if his mother's estimate of when he left is correct (see my previous post). Frances obviously lived in Ward Green, with or near the older Malkin family in 1908 when she got the job. But William's last address in Barnsley is given in his 1916 Chronicle obituary as Grove Street - which is near Barnsley football ground and about a mile and a half from Ward Green. It is, however, just off Pontefract Road, which is where Frances was living in 1911. If only there were more records of where people lived!

Part of an article in the Barnsley Chronicle 7 August 1915
(thanks to Barnsley Archives)

I did find a few more mentions of Mrs Malkin in the Chronicle. In 1915 she is commended by an Inspector of the Local Government Board, who stated that, "Mrs Malkin had not been doing herself justice in that she did not report the total number of visits and revisits actually made." Her role was described as the supervisor of midwives and investigator of the cases of ophthalmia neonatum. The same article also mentions that, "she has rendered very special services in this respect since the adoption of the Notification of Births' Act and that such inspection by your lady visitor is very much more efficient than two visits to each midwife that used to be made by the Medical Officer." (Barnsley Chronicle 7 August 1915)

Frances Malkin resigns her post in September 1916, but is obviously re-employed after her marriage to Joseph Jeffs as the item I found first mentions her (second) resignation in early May 1918. This is probably because she and Joseph are about to have a child themselves, as Joseph Cunningham Jeffs is born on 8 May 1918, according to his father's war time service records. Joseph snr attests in 1915, but is not mobilised until June 1917 when he is posted to the Royal Garrison Artillery.

Unhappily Joseph Henry Jeffs returns from the First World War with a good character, but is discharged in November 1918 with 'Mania' caused by his service. Whatever this entails it affects him very badly as he is granted a pension for 26 weeks due to his 50% disability. I hope that Frances was working again by then as the 13 shillings and 9d per week he was awarded wouldn't have gone far to support himself and a wife and child. His name appears on the Barnsley Borough Police Roll of Honour where it is noted that he was Wounded in Action - as I can see no mention of wounds in his service record this is probably a reference to the damage to his mental health. I hope that he recovered and returned to his job in the police force.

Frances Mary Jeffs dies in Barnsley in 1946 aged 75 years. Joseph Henry Jeffs dies in Barnsley in 1953 aged 62. I do not know where they are buried. Clifton Trevor Malkin marries and has two children. Joseph Cunningham Jeffs marries and has four children. These children will more than likely still be alive today.

I imagine Frances to have been a hard working, well respected member of the community. She managed a job and a family over 100 years ago. She twice married a much younger man, her second husband was possibly disabled for some time after the war, but with the help of an extended family successfully brought up two children. What an example to us today!

I would love to know more about the life and career of Frances Mary Bailey - Malkin - Jeffs, Barnsley's First Health Visitor.

After writing this I submitted it to 'Blogging Against Disablism Day' - it was serendipitous, I hadn't realised it was today (1 May 2015) but something nice had to happen today to balance all the bad ****. There is also a Facebook page with lots of links to other people's posts. Please read.

Renewing my Disabled aka Concessionary Bus Pass (or not?)

South Yorkshire Concessionary Bus Pass

Over the past few days I have been trying to arrange for the renewal of my disabled bus pass. I have had this pass for 5 years. I got it because my GP wrote a simple letter explaining that I have Crohn's Disease, Fibromyalgia and Asthma and have difficulty walking very far. You would think it would be simple to get it renewed. Well it is not. Be warned, if you have a pass and it runs out in the next 6 weeks or so, start the process of getting it renewed now. Mine expires on 10 May 2015. I have NO HOPE of getting a new one before it expires now.

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2015

So far this week I have phoned Travel South Yorkshire, who told me to phone Barnsley Council. I need a 'letter of eligibility' from the Council before the Transport people can renew the pass. The Council will only issue the 'letter of eligibility' if I have 8 points from the Personal Independence Payment (the new Disablitity Living Allowance) or a letter from my doctor.

On Wednesday I posted on Facebook (which I find very supportive when I'm down):
"A title for a very ranty blog post that I'm not going to write, "How it took me four hours on the phone to get an appointment to renew my disabled bus pass". Honest truth - from 9.30am to 15.30 this afternoon (with a two hour break for a talk at Cudworth Fire Station) I've spoken to the SYPTE, the Council, my Drs, CAB, the Northern General Hospital and the DWP."

Obviously I've changed my mind on writing a blog post since then! Sometimes writing it all down helps me. You never know ...

As I say above, I phoned my doctor's surgery (twice) as instructed by the Council to try to get a letter. Apparently the surgery have been told NOT to write letters for anyone. Despite that I made an appointment to see a GP. I was willing, and had the OH's agreement, to pay for a private letter, similar to the one I got (eventually) for my Open University exams. However, after struggling onto a bus to Monk Bretton (I am having a really bad week after a trip to London last weekend), the doctor I saw absolutely refused to write a letter of any kind.

On my return home this morning I posted on Facebook again:
"My GP has just refused to write even a private letter supporting the renewal of my disabled bus pass. She stated that the Barnsley PCT had told all the doctors not to write letters any more. I just looked up Barnsley PCT - we haven't had one since 2013. Has anyone else had this problem? Any ideas on how I can get my pass renewed? I have requested a letter from my consultant and from the DWP - I am in receipt of NI credits as a valid claimant of ESA - I get no money though as they means test and poor [OH's name here] is meant to keep me. I don't know what I'll do if I can't get to the Archives once a week ... it was my only real outing."

Various friends responded that I should try CAB (done once but will try again) or the local social services and try applying for PIP anyway and appealing when I get turned down.

I spent 23 minutes on the phone to the DWP applying for PIP. They will send me a form (Facebook friends advised that I should get CAB to help me fill it in) and also send me for an assessment.

The criteria for 8 points of PIP mobility is that I am able to walk 20 metres but not 50 metres, safely, repeatedly and in a reasonable time, to an acceptable standard. I think it all depends who measures this. On a good day I can walk to the local Co-op which is about 160 metres, although I have trouble going much further, on a bad day I can't even get out of bed to make the OH his tea.

My next Facebook post was:
"Citizens Advice (in South Wales) won't make me an appointment (in Barnsley) until I have the PIP form in my hand. They put me onto Age UK (in Devon) who gave me the number for Age UK in Barnsley. Well, I think I could have managed that myself if I'd had any hope it would work. Basically no-one can understand WHY my GP refuses to write a letter stating my disabilities. I have not worked since 2009 ... I have had a genuine claim for ESA allowed since January 2010. All I want is a bus pass. I'm not asking for actual money. Just the ability to get out and see more than these four walls occasionally ... and to support the local Archives who are having their hours cut because people don't visit them enough."

I was by this time crying and very upset. I haven't been well this week and this is not helping. I believe the government's changes to the way they give money (or benefits in kind) to disabled people is the reason behind the intransigence of my GP to write a letter. And of course the reduction in distance you can walk has been well discussed online in the past two years. It just hadn't affected me so far. Well, now it has. And it hurts.

The letter that I asked for on Wednesday from the DWP has arrived today, but it doesn't even mention ESA, it just says I have a Credits Claim dating back to January 2010. The possibility of a letter from my consultant is my last hope ...

AgeUK logo

The Age UK people in Barnsley are willing to send someone out to me to help me fill in the PIP form when it comes, which is at least better than CAB who would have wanted me to go to Wellington House - which is about 0.3 of a mile from the bus station, nearly 500 metres.

In the meantime I'll just sit here and try to be calm ...

While recording and identifying World War One soldiers for the Barnsley War Memorials Project we often come across stories that may not be from our own family history, but are so interesting or plain odd that we feel they should be shared.

1917 Face of the War Memorial
at St Luke's Worsborough Common

Both myself and our Information Officer PS are intrigued by James and John Kenny of Worsbrough (sometimes Worsborough or Worsbro') Common, cousins who joined the Barnsley Pals together and were sadly killed on the same day as each other.

On the war memorial at St Luke's, Worsbro' Common the names are sorted by year. 1914 and 1915 fit on one panel with the dedication and then 1916, 1917 and 1918 have a panel each. In total there are 46 names on the memorial, I have identified all but two men, and even for one of those I have an educated guess about who he is. I have been adding their stories to the Lives of the First World War (LFWW) community for Worsborough Common, which will eventually (hopefully) include all the men and women from the area who served, or were affected by the war.

On the 1917 panel there are two men with the same surname, and unusually on the memorial, in order to differentiate them they have their forenames indicated. John and Jas (though James would only have been another two letters!) Kenny were cousins and had lived near each other all their lives. Their service numbers are even sequential (although that might be to do with the fact they have the same surname) and both their service records survived the blitz, although they are very damaged.

Both men were unmarried and working as miners when they enlisted in the 14th York and Lancaster Regiment (the 2nd Barnsley Pals) on 9 March 1915. James (b.Q1 1881) from 31 Peel Street, Worsbro' Common was 34 years old, although he claimed to be 33 and 64 days, knocking one year off his age. He was assigned the service number 14/832. John (b.Q2 1874) from the White Bear Inn, Worsbro' Common was nearly 41 years old but claimed to be 37 years and 323 days old, removing a more substantial three years from his age. His service number was 14/833. I find these numbers very easy to remember and that is quite handy as I now have so many men 'remembered' on LFWW, which has no alphabetical sort mechanism, that it is simpler to just enter a number to get to a man I am updating.

1930s map snip of Worsbro' Common (from Old Maps)

You can see how close to each other the men lived in the map snip above. Peel Street is just below the word 'Stone' of High Stone Road, the main road running diagonally across the image. The White Bear Inn is the square block on the end of a row of back to backs directly across the road from the end of Peel Street. It was still there a few years ago (link to Google maps) and was one of the few remaining old buildings in the area.

Like most of the other men in the 2nd Barnsley Pals they were posted overseas at the end of 1915 and spent a few months in Egypt. They arrived in France in March 1916 and appear to have survived the infamous first day of the Battle of the Somme unscathed. There are no wound reports in either of their service records. The only mention of any medical treatment I can find is that John apparently had his boils looked at 'In the Field' in April 1916. Neither man appears to have committed any recordable offence, which considering their history in Barnsley in their youth is quite remarkable.

In searching the British Newspaper Archive which I can access via Find My Past I found a couple of mentions of the Kenny family. One typical entry is from the Sheffield Evening Telegraph in 1903 headlined 'Barnsley Gambling Raids'. James Kenny (our man would have been 22 years old at the time), Thomas Kenny, George Kenny and a number of others, some of whom may have been related to the Kenny family by marriage, were implicated in a gambling school at Worsborough Common. The police gave evidence that, 'the defendants, with some 30 or 40 others, were engaged gambling in Moss Square on the afternoon of Sunday, the 22nd ult." (Sheffield Evening Telegraph 2 April 1903) Moss Square is adjacent to the White Bear Inn. Most of the men were found guilty and fined 10s and costs.

Privates J and J Kenny from the Barnsley Chronicle 9 June 1917
(With thanks to Barnsley Archives)

I found pictures of both men in the Barnsley Chronicle after their deaths in France on 8 May 1917 were reported. Unfortunately both images were labelled Pte J Kenny (Worsbro' Common, killed) so I don't know which is which. Maybe we could take a guess at the one on the left being the older man, but I wouldn't like to say for certain.

Their obituary in the Barnsley Chronicle is very short, in the midst of a column of reports about other Barnsley soldiers there appears, "From Worsbro' Common comes the news that two cousins, Private John Kenny (42), of the White Bear, and Private James Kenny (36) of Peel Street, were both killed on May 8th. Both men were unmarried, John formerly working at Round Green Colliery and James at Barnsley Main Colliery." (Barnsley Chronicle 2 June 1917)

John and Elizabeth Kenny in Worsbro' Common in 1841 (from Ancestry)

I have researched the Kenny family going back to the mutual grandfather of the two men and forward to people who may well still be alive today. John Kenny was born around 1809 in Louth, Ireland (according to the 1851 census) which is a county on the east coast in the present Republic. We can only assume he married Elizabeth (maiden name unknown) who was from Wombwell, in Yorkshire at some point before or around the birth of their first child, another James, in 1840. In the 1841 census they are living in Worbro' Common and John is a weaver. He indicates his origin in Ireland with an I in the final column of his record.

John and Elizabeth have at least seven children, I have found five who marry and two spinster sisters, Hannah and Mary who keep a shop in Worsbro' Common up to their deaths in the 1920s. I have found 32 grandchildren! Surprisingly only the two men who feature in this story appear to have joined up to serve in the war - although Kenny is a fairly common name and there are other Kennys from Barnsley who serve who are (probably) not related. A female cousin of the men, Annie Kenny, is widowed in 1919 and remarries shortly afterwards, but there is nothing to suggest that her husband William Hinchliffe died of anything related to the war.

Both John and James Kenny are remembered on the Arras Memorial in France. This suggests that they had no known grave. However some personal items are listed in their service records as returned to the next of kin of each man; James a letter and some photos, John a letter, postcards, photos and two religious books. This may be because they left these items behind somewhere safer when they went into the action in which they were killed. Both men had given their religion as Roman Catholic on their enlistment papers, which is probably why I can't find their baptisms or their grandparents marriage on Ancestry. Their service records also each contain a completed 'Next of Kin' form which lists their parents, even though James parents were both deceased by this time and so was John's mother, and their siblings. This is very useful as it confirms their sisters' married names. Both are unfortunately very faint as if written in pencil and then maybe water damaged.

Snip from James Kenny's entry in the
Army Registers of Soldiers' Effects (on Ancestry)

In the records of Soldiers' Effects which were recently released on Ancestry there is even a list of all of James' siblings as his balance of pay was divided equally between them all in November 1917, presumably due to both his parents being dead.

You can just make out sisters Mrs Rose Sheldon and Mrs Hannah Lambert who each got on penny less than brothers George and John and sister Bessie whose married name, Winfield, is not given. Later on, I think in 1919, eldest brother George receives a separate £9. This appears to be the War Gratuity paid by the War Office which may equate to the total time served by the man.

According to the Battalion War Diaries recently released on Ancestry (what would I do without it!) 14th York and Lancaster Regiment had been 'In the Line' at Gavrelle and Windmill, part of the Battle of Arras, since 2 May 1917. They were heavily shelled from the 4 May onwards with numerous casualties. On 8 May the enemy barrage ceased at 7am and during the night they were attacked by four or five waves of Germans. The trenches were very muddy and there was rain and mist. Our side called down an answering artillery barrage and "the double barrage made the area like an inferno". On 9 May the writer of the diary reports that they were relieved by 12th York and Lancs (the Sheffield Pals) and he lists a total of 2 Officers and 29 other ranks killed, 2 officers and 109 other ranks wounded, 2 men missing and 2 wounded who remained on duty, adding up to 145 men out of action. They had however captured a German machine gun and 43 enemy rifles!

The brevity of the Kenny men's obituary and the 'inferno' described by the officer together with the lack of known graves paints a sad picture. Were they defending their trench from the Germans side by side and both killed? - but surely if this was the case their bodies would have been returned and buried. What is more likely is that the two cousins were hit by a shell and completely lost amid the mud and rain. There was nothing left to bury.

Sarah & Robert Kenny's gravestone
in Barnsley Cemetery

John Kenny is remembered on his family's gravestone in plot E 547 of Barnsley Cemetery.

In Loving Memory of / Sarah / the beloved wife of / Robert Kenny / of Worsboro Common / who died February 25th 1908 / aged 68 years / Gone, but not forgotten / Also Tom, the beloved son / of the above / who died August 29th 1914 / aged 35 years / Also Pte John Kenny, 14th York & Lancs / son of the above / who fell in action in France May 8th 1917 / aged 43 years / Also the above named / Robert Kenny / who died February 16th 1918 / aged 75 years.

This is the branch of the family who ran the White Bear Inn, maybe they had a little bit extra money for a nice gravestone. Note that this stone says that John was 43 years old, the newspaper report only said he was 42. There is no evidence of a stone remembering cousin James.

Lest We Forget.

Too tired to Research; Why I'm tired ... and did you know it's Raining?

Too poor and ill for a Post Office Account?

Not a Moment to Myself These Days!

Finding a Nurse in the Absent Voters' List for Barnsley in World War One

Why Do I Research First World War Soldiers' Stories?

Villains and Heroes - One Family on Find My Past

Timeline View of Lives of the First World War

Attaching External Evidence to Lives of the First World War

WW1 Soldier's Story - The Importance of Knowing Where Your Spoon is At

A Chemist Goes to War (and so does his sister) The Johnson's of Church Street, Barnsley

A Trail of Clues leading to the Guest Family - Grocers of Market Hill, Barnsley

The Rise & Fall of Henry Carter & Sons of No 7 Market Hill

Identifying Men on Barnsley's War Memorials

In Search of Albert Pagett, a Visit to St Helen's Church, Hemsworth

The 'Office Copy' of the 1918 Absent Voters' List for Barnsley

Following up Clues in the New Book about Elsecar's Fallen Parishioners

Barnsley's Australian WW1 Connections

Barnsley's First Health Visitor - Frances Mary Malkin, later Jeffs

Renewing my Disabled aka Concessionary Bus Pass (or not?)

World War One Soldiers - Cousins from Worsboro' Common who joined together and died together