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Dear John915,

A quick look at Wikipedia shows the The Middlesex Regt's badge, with MIDDLESEX REGT. below. It looks like something like the left hand collar badge on my grandfather's uniform.

That's really helpful, thanks.

Wikipedia is lighten detail. Do you know of any archive/book/internet resource that would describe their movement in the Boar War? I've tried, for instance,

http://www.regiments.org/regiments/uk/inf/057Midx.htm (Page not found)
http://www.prole.demon.co.uk/middlesex/index.htm (Page not found)
http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/middx_roh.htm (WWII and after)
etc

Thanks for any additional help you can give!

Best wishes, Jon

Hello,

According to my father, this is a photograph of my great grandfather George William Hall. I believe that he was born in Jun 1883 in Auckland (10a 242), Durham. We have heard from the family that he fought in the Boer War, but do not know this for certain. If he had fought, I realise that he would have been very young.

His uniform is so indistinct as to make it impossible for me to make anything of the collar insignia. Does anyone have any idea of his military connection in this photograph?

Thanks, Jon

From Tomatilo's thread on Durham mining books, I picked up the out of copyright version of Fynes book:

"The Miners of Northumberland and Durham"

available from

http://www.archive.org/stream/minersnorthumbe00fynegoog/minersnorthumbe00fynegoog_djvu.txt

This thread is only useful if you have the electronic book from that link. Please note that the book is scanned, and that many typographical errors exist in it; these include misspellings of names, hard to decipher words, etc.

I've created a concordance of all the proper nouns (I cheated, they're just all capitalised words) that appear in the text of that book.

I did this to hunt for mentions of my mining relatives' names. From it, for instance, I now know that the name Hunter appears in the book on lines 342, 3672, 7742, 7744, 13164, 14022.

But it strikes me that this might be useful to others on this and the Northumberland forum. Attached to this message is the concordance: it's < 90K to download. A snippet from the file is:

Agitation 322, 413
Aglionby 7215, 7497
Agreed 16795, 16801, 16808, 16811, 16820
Agreement 17981
Agulations 2363
Ah 4825
Ai 441
Aind 14783
Aisbeliaved 14911
AlTD 3542
Alderman 12246
Alex 13150, 14981, 14982
Alexander 488, 504, 4429, 11596, 12482, 12502, 13203, 15424

You'll see there are many errors, but - if you were looking for the surname Alexander (for instance), you'd know to look at lines 488, 504, ..., and 15424 of the downloaded file.

Creating a concordance isn't difficult if you know something about software (specifically, unix and perl), and I'm happy to share code and stuff with others who wish to do the same with other texts.

Hope it helps someone, Jon

Dear All,

ScouseBoy: Thanks. I tried as you suggested FreeBMD, but it didn't give me anything.

Rados: Does any of this tally with other information you have?

Best wishes to you all, and merry Christmas!

Jon

And could the name be Howard Brooks Lyons/Hyons

Jon