Author Topic: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?  (Read 5697 times)

Offline Creasegirl

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #27 on: Wednesday 03 October 18 16:58 BST (UK) »
Agree wth a lot of other posts that wouldnt want to have swapped all jobs as my family were miners worked in paisley mills agricultural labourers and fisherman or even a postman living in borough in london.  Think wasnt much leisure time or money and lots of kids to look after and no healthcare or benefits meaning going to workhouse sometimes.
Ferguson (st fillans, comrie)
Garnock (lothian, fife)
Valet (london, switzerland)
Butcher (ramsgate, glasgow)
Blackbird (durham,  newcastle)
Barr (ayrshire, ireland)
Fleming (paisley)
Crone, croney ,(dumfriesshire, ireland)

Offline River Tyne Lass

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #28 on: Thursday 04 October 18 10:14 BST (UK) »
I have remembered the name of the book I mentioned in post 22 - it was called 'Sisters of the Somme' by Penny Starns.

Iluleah that was such a sad and moving story you related.  I have come across other similar ones mentioned by you and Viktoria.  What a tragedy that there was no real help for those who survived physically  but suffered so much afterwards in their mental health.  I think detachment seems to have been an after effect.  There was someone who married into my family tree and after the Great War he left his wife and five  children and went to live in a completely different area from all his family even the family he had grown up with.  He remained separate until his death in the 1940s. 

This is why I have put that I could not follow in the shoes of those who were soldiers.  Most of my ancestors who served in the Great War were killed.  It is my view after reading and researching so much on the Great War that it is more true to say these men had their lives laid down rather than the phrase we hear so often that they laid down their lives.  They didn't have much choice.  If so many were happy to 'lay down their lives' why was there the need for conscription.  I do feel for the poor men who may have reached breaking point with their nerves and who were shot for alleged cowardness.  I am currently reading 'All Quiet On The Western Front' Which is a fictional story written from the German side.  Very illuminating about how hellish the situation was in the trenches during the Great War.  I have heard that Hitler issued a ban on this book.   I think probably because it showed the realities of what this war entailed and what those who served on both sides really felt about it.

Conroy, Fitzpatrick, Watson, Miller, Davis/Davies, Brown, Senior, Dodds, Grieveson, Gamesby, Simpson, Rose, Gilboy, Malloy, Dalton, Young, Saint, Anderson, Allen, McKetterick, McCabe, Drummond, Parkinson, Armstrong, McCarroll, Innes, Marshall, Atkinson, Glendinning, Fenwick, Bonner

Offline iluleah

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #29 on: Thursday 04 October 18 13:16 BST (UK) »
I don't think any of us realise how difficult that time ( WW1) was for people unless we were alive at that time.
I spent lots of time as a child with my dads aunt and her husband, they never had children and she was very strict/rigid, he was such a kind and gentle man but I loved visiting them each and every Saturday on my own, having lunch with them, he taught me to play chess and encouraged me to draw. I always wondered why conversations stopped between he and my dad when I came into the room, later on to find out it was "WW1 talk". My dad died when I was 17, Great Uncle Fred lived for another 20 yrs it was only once I started FH I tried to find out/research  his service records and found he was in some dreadful battles.... wish he could have told me.

.....and just recently I found an old local newsletter naming my maternal grandfathers brother and my great grandfather, he was asking for his son to be excused " as he was the only one on the farm who could work the horses" it was declined and he was told to sign up. Those snippets are a real window into day to day issues they faced.
Having previously researched animals in WW1  I knew many of those horses would have also been taken to use and most of them never came home, some eight million horses were used and only 60,000 returned. I know the horses on the farm were working and not 'pets' but they loved/looked after them and it would have been a huge loss to them.
Leicestershire:Chamberlain, Dakin, Wilkinson, Moss, Cook, Welland, Dobson, Roper,Palfreman, Squires, Hames, Goddard, Topliss, Twells,Bacon.
Northamps:Sykes, Harris, Rice,Knowles.
Rutland:Clements, Dalby, Osbourne, Durance, Smith,Christian, Royce, Richardson,Oakham, Dewey,Newbold,Cox,Chamberlaine,Brow, Cooper, Bloodworth,Clarke
Durham/Yorks:Woodend, Watson,Parker, Dowser
Suffolk/Norfolk:Groom, Coleman, Kemp, Barnard, Alden,Blomfield,Smith,Howes,Knight,Kett,Fryston
Lincolnshire:Clements, Woodend

Online Viktoria

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #30 on: Thursday 04 October 18 13:47 BST (UK) »
Yes, All Quiet on the Western Front illustrates so well the jingoism which whipped up patriotism.
Old men urging- by very underhand and devious means-young the young men to join up.
Siegfried Sassoon related how on leave in London he could still smell the stench of unburied bodies and could see mangled corpses on the streets.
I think after that he went tp Craiglockhart for psychiatric help with Wilfred Owen.
There is a poem ,not sure ,but Robert Graves I think,after some high ranking officer had passed along the road where the troops were footslogging .
I am open to correction but this is the best I can remember:-

He`s a doughty old fellow,
 Said Harry to Jack,
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack
But he did for them all with his plan of attack.


Many mothers were really "patriotic"but when their boy had gone ,
Well--their urging and" sacrifice" shamed many boys into going and to their deaths.
Harry Patch summed it up exactly when he said that he had been sent to a foreign country to shoot men he never knew,whose language he could not speak and after so many many lost and ruined lives it was all settled over a table in a railway carriage.
What a sobering thought.
Viktoria.
Felt quite uncertain re the quote,so looked it up inAnthem for Doomed Youth and it is Siegfried Sassoon.
THE GENERAL.
Good morning  good morning the general said
.When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are all of them dead
And we`re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
He`s a cheery old card grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras  with rifle and pack,------

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Sorry about poor punctuation .
Viktoria.


Online Viktoria

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #31 on: Thursday 04 October 18 14:02 BST (UK) »
There is a charity founded by two sisters who went to what was Mesopotamia where their brother had been killed and buried.
he was a mounted soldier.
They noticed some horses in very poor health with dreadful wounds. On examination they could just see faint  numbers where they had been branded,they were ex British army horses.
The army or government deemed it too expensive to take the horses home so they were sold in Mesopotamia.
The charity is The Brook Charity.It is sometimjes on T.V now.
Many farm horses requisitioned were not returned,they were shot and so cruelly as it was  done like a queue where soldiers got their inioculations.Those waiting could see.
The horses waiting knew what was happening,how needlessly cruel.Such patient loyal animals who had endured dreadful conditions and fear to be dispatched like that.
Viktoria.

Offline River Tyne Lass

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #32 on: Thursday 04 October 18 18:04 BST (UK) »
Oh Viktoria, that is atrocious! :o. How could they treat the poor horses like that!    I think never mind the expense they should have found a way to return the horses home.  What a way to treat these poor creatures after all their service - pure heartlessness! :o :'(

In my opinion both sides should have made an agreement to fight the war without any animals involved. 

God bless those two sisters.

Conroy, Fitzpatrick, Watson, Miller, Davis/Davies, Brown, Senior, Dodds, Grieveson, Gamesby, Simpson, Rose, Gilboy, Malloy, Dalton, Young, Saint, Anderson, Allen, McKetterick, McCabe, Drummond, Parkinson, Armstrong, McCarroll, Innes, Marshall, Atkinson, Glendinning, Fenwick, Bonner

Online Viktoria

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #33 on: Thursday 04 October 18 18:50 BST (UK) »
I think the old way of each side  appointing a Champion was best,,only the Champions fought and the side to which the winner belonged  had won the war.
Hand to hand combat like gladiators,but both using the same weapons.
Better still if the heads of state did the fighting,that would make them think was it all worth it .
Trump v .Putin-----Just a thought after thinking about all the young men who were left  in the ground in France, Belgium and
Near East and further afield in subsequent wars.
The numbers are unbelievable yet we know they are true.

How must it have been for those people who got the awful telegrammes at any time but such times as after the first day of the Somme,when in places like  Accrington and surrounding villages and small towns there was hardly a street which did not have a telegramme and in some houses two or three when brothers and father were all lost.I have the Roll of Honour and more than one man in a house was not at all unusual .
No one would want to swap with those poor people and most of them could not afford to visit their lad`s graves.supposing they had one and were not just a name on a memorial.
Viktoria.
Viktoria.

Offline iluleah

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #34 on: Thursday 04 October 18 18:55 BST (UK) »
This gives some information, although my thoughts are not the complete truth of the reality of what really happened, such as lots more of them  ending up on continental dinner plates  http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zp6bjxs#zshr7ty

My grandfather who was too young to join up in WW1 he would have know, fed and handled his dads farm shires who were taken for WW1 and I was told by my mother that during her childhood  in the 1940s he was the last farmer in the area to keep and work a team of shires on the farm. I remember a man who said very little, you listened when he spoke he was very "Victorian" and he cried when the ministry came to distroy his large diary and beef herds during the "foot and mouth"
Leicestershire:Chamberlain, Dakin, Wilkinson, Moss, Cook, Welland, Dobson, Roper,Palfreman, Squires, Hames, Goddard, Topliss, Twells,Bacon.
Northamps:Sykes, Harris, Rice,Knowles.
Rutland:Clements, Dalby, Osbourne, Durance, Smith,Christian, Royce, Richardson,Oakham, Dewey,Newbold,Cox,Chamberlaine,Brow, Cooper, Bloodworth,Clarke
Durham/Yorks:Woodend, Watson,Parker, Dowser
Suffolk/Norfolk:Groom, Coleman, Kemp, Barnard, Alden,Blomfield,Smith,Howes,Knight,Kett,Fryston
Lincolnshire:Clements, Woodend

Online Viktoria

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Re: Which Ancestors Could You Comfortable Lifeswap With?
« Reply #35 on: Thursday 04 October 18 19:18 BST (UK) »
Programme on tonight,a Documentary at 8-30 ITV 3 about a vet who went to the front specifically to look after the horses.
Have plenty of tissues ready.
Viktoria.