Dear colleenMc and JoanP,
I don't know if you're still around.
Especially JoanP ( who just made the one post)
Do either of you know when your family or Wilnor celebrated his birthday ( ie month or day) ? I assume he had a celebrated birthday, or a very close date to his real birth, if they didn't know the exact date he was born.
I have finally found what I believe is very likely to be Wilnor's birth!
It has taken me these many years to find it, I have never given up . I also had to wait, and wait for this birth , privacy laws , coupled with other things and a story that I was told many years ago by my mother that one of the sisters ( her aunts) gave away a boy child . ( I didn't know which one of my grandmother's
eldest sisters that it was. I also never mentioned this as I didn't want to muddy the factual waters by passed down oral history about this birth of one of the sisters.)
The birth date of my great Aunt's illegitimate child exactly fits both Wilnor's reported death age on the army rolls and his reported death announcement in the local papers, both have two different death ages for Wilnor 21 and 22 years old ,which of course can be confusing!- But it totally makes sense now - if what I am holding is Wilnor's birth cert , which my gut and many combined factors is saying it is him.
.
The month and day that my great Aunt's son was born ,he would have been still 21 years of age on that 14th June 1944 , and he would have just turned 22 when it was reported in local press back home just a few weeks later . The two reported ages are correct at the time of recording it if Wilnor is indeed my great Aunt's birth son.
It's trying to 100% prove that the illegitimate birth of the baby boy that my gran's sister gave birth to and gave up is Wilnor, which is the difficult thing , as it being long before formal adoption law years.
Everything is pointing that way.
The baby boy's Christian name wasn't Wilnor on birth of course , my great grandmother ( the grandmother of the child) reported the child's birth, and going by his full birth names on the cert, I suspect had a great hand in naming the birth name. The child is not a known child we have in the family today - this child disappears from the radar. No father listed on the birth of course, as to be expected.
My gran's sister did not marry for years after the birth of her illegitimate son , (she married in later life, and was a spinster ) and had no children with her husband ( an English soldier who was stationed in Ireland)She moved away from Ireland to England after her marriage to her husband .
Her birth son isn't mentioned in her will , so either her son did not outlive his mother, or this is the sister that gave up her child, or both.( checked deaths too and he did not die as a baby or a child under his birth name )
Very Kind regards
Ps.would you know if Wilnor was around 7 years old when your family adopted him ? I have this figure of 7 in my memories ( and I really don't know if that is 7 years or 7 months old ) - the sisters have two illegitimate births who weren't raised by them( two of the sisters of my gran and my great uncle Tom ) - sometimes the oral stories from my mother and grandmother collide into each other in my memories . But I believe one of these two children was 7 when their birth mother left them, but don't know which one of the two children this was( the other child grew up with the the birth
mother's family , with the child's grandmother and my own grandmother) . That child was a female , which I know what happened to her. She is ( was) one of my godparents ( she died when I was toddler)
I am just wondering if your Wilnor was around 7 years old when your family adopted him ( it would also make sense why my great uncle Tommy in the article ,knew him to be his nephew ).
PPs sorry for this long message, I keep on adding more to it.
