The war memorial - and beyond

For several years I have been researching the names on the war memorial in the town where I live, Chesham, in Buckinghamshire. I know from the enquiries we receive at The National Archives that  many other people have been doing the same, especially since the centenary of the First World War. Because of the job that I do, as Family History Specialist at The National Archives, I thought it would be interesting to see what I could find out about the men who served, and who survived the war. It seemed like a good idea at the time...

In fact, it has proved very rewarding, although I have spent much more time on it than I intended when I started. But that is the nature of many a research project, I suppose. Like many memorials, the one in Chesham town centre lists names without the rank or even the branch of the armed services, and the first names are represented by initials only. This means that it can be difficult to identify some of the casualties - there are still a few names on the Chesham memorial that have defied all efforts to identify them. Fortunately, I did not have to start my research from scratch, there were already two wonderful resources that I could consult. One is the magnificent Roll of Honour site, which lists names and biographical details from First and Second World War memorials throughout the United Kingdom, as well as useful background information. The other is local in its scope, but for anyone interested in the First World War anywhere in the county Buckinghamshire Remembers is invaluable. It includes not only details from every memorial in the county, but also a lot of information on many men, and some women, who survived the war. 

I put together the some of my initial research into a talk I gave at The National Archives in November 2014 'Putting it all together: using archives to discover your community's involvement in the First World War'. Since then I have learned more, and new resources have been released online. There are 184 names on the Chesham town war memorial, and I have now collected details of more than 2000 men, and a few women, who served in the armed forces, or were in some way involved in the war, or the war effort. Deciding who to include was not as straightforward as you might imagine. It was easy enough to set the geographical boundaries; the ancient parish of Chesham, and its former chapelries of Chesham Bois and Latimer, including several nearby small villages. It was much harder to decide who 'belonged' to Chesham, and therefore who should be included. I decided that anyone who lived or worked in Chesham, albeit briefly, would qualify, so I included several men born in Chesham, but who had moved away, sometimes even to other countries, so there are some on my list who served with overseas forces, mainly the Australian or Canadian Expeditionary Forces. Many still had relatives in Chesham, and some of the casualties among them are on the Chesham or other local memorials. 

The biggest single problem encountered in this kind of research is the loss of so many soldiers' records, probably about 60% of them, during a bombing raid in the Second World War. The great majority of men served in the army as 'other ranks', so this is a major obstacle, but the records of men in the other armed services, and those who were army officers, have generally survived, so it's not all bad news. But even without a service record, there are other ways to find out more about a soldier. As a general rule, it is often easier to find information on men who died, because of the information recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which often gives the man's home address, and his next-of-kin. However, some CWGC entries give no extra information at all, but the Naval and Military Press database Soldiers Died in the Great War provides a man's place of birth, and place of enlistment. and the National Army Museum's Register of Soldiers' Effects provides information on next-of-kin. These last two resources are available on Ancestry, and using all three, you should be able to identify most of the deceased. 

It can be much more difficult to find out about survivors of the war. Everyone who served overseas with the army will have a medal index card, and these records are complete, but they contain no personal information, so you need to use other sources to identify the right person, if there is no service record for them. In fact, it is not always possible to find out if a man served at all, but there are some sources that you can use, and this becomes easier as more records are digitised and indexed online. 

The most useful of these is the Absent Voters' List, if you can find one for the area where a serviceman lived. I was very lucky in that the Chesham list for 1918 had already been transcribed on Buckinghamshire Remembers, but they are still very easy to use if you consult them directly. The 1918 lists are the most useful, because they were compiled early in that year, while most men were still in the armed forces.  Demobilisation was well underway in 1919, but there are Absent Voters' Lists for 1919 and 1920, which obviously contain far fewer names, but are still valuable. These lists show a man's home address, his branch of the service, his unit or ship etc, and his number. Most of the men in an Absent Voters' List will have survived the war, but there are some who died very late in the war, after the lists were compiled.

It would take a long time to describe all the sources I used, and how I combined the information I found in them to reach my conclusions. But I think the most important lesson I learned was that you can sometimes resolve some apparently insoluble problems using many different sources. Two or three sources may not be enough, but by carefully combining scraps of information from several more sources you may be able to work out which was which, out of several men with the same name. I used some of these techniques to work out which of many George Donaldson casualties was my great-uncle. I described this in more detail in my post 'Finding Uncle Geordie' and with my Chesham men I was able to attach four men called George Darvell, and another four called Frank Gomm, to their respective families. There were, and still are, quite a number of families in Chesham with those surnames.

Where possible, I have listed the wives of the men who were married, including their maiden surnames, and this is another way of seeing how inter-related some of the local families were. There is a lot more to explore, when I have the time, helped by some of information gleaned from newspapers. And these are not always local newspapers - several men were in the Gloucestershire Regiment, and lists of casualties in newspapers there include each man's place of residence, so several Chesham men appear in them. 

Some facts and figures

To date, I have found nearly twice as many casualties than are listed on the memorial. Some appear on other memorials in the area, or further afield if they had moved away. More than 1700 of my 2000+ names were men who served in the British Army, with 87 and 89 in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, respectively. A further 62 served in the armies of other countries, 16 were Royal Marines, and a handful served in the merchant navy or one of the Naval Reserve forces. More than 20 local women were in the Voluntary Aid Detachment or one of the women's forces, and a similar number of women were recruited into the Post Office or the Metropolitan Railway, replacing men who were in the forces.

About 300 men had joined the local regiment, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, but many joined other county regiments, or other non-regional parts of the army such as the Royal Engineers, Royal Artillery, Royal Army Medical Corps, Labour Corps or Army Service Corps, to name just a few. Before 1914 it was possible, but extremely rare, for men to be promoted from the ranks to become officers, but under the exceptional circumstances of the first World War it was much more likely, and 20 Chesham men were promoted.

In most cases I was able to identify the parents of the men on the list, so I can easily see which families sent more than one son to war. More than 100 Chesham families had three or more sons in the forces, and nine families sent five sons. Nineteen families lost two sons, and one family lost three of their five sons. 

About 100 of the men on my list were discharged from service before the end of hostilities, and if they were in the army it is worth looking for them in the Silver War Badge rolls, available on Ancestry. Although 'SWB' often appears on Medal Index Cards, there is more information on the rolls, which usually give exact dates of service, and whether the cause was wounds or sickness. In some cases they even give the man's age. I have found that more men were discharged for sickness than for wounds, and in either case most will have returned to civilian life suffering from some long-term damage, physical or mental. 

Yet to come...

Anyone who is still doing this kind of research will no doubt be eagerly awaiting the release of the 1921 Census on Findmypast, to see what their community looked like after the war. The information collected on children under 16, the 'orphanhood' question, will be particularly interesting when looking at how families were re-shaped after the war. How many widows remarried? I know of one who did, to her dead husband's twin brother. But this wasn't legal in 1921 (they married in 1923), so I am very curious to see if they were in the same household in the census...

Those Places Thursday - Chesham 'Boots, brushes and baptists'

Ornamental pillars at
Chesham station

Chesham is a market town in Buckinghamshire, and it has been my home since 2002. It's a nice place to live, surrounded by the open countryside of the Chiltern hills, but with a fast train service to London. In fact, the station is art of the London Underground, despite the fact that you have to walk up quite a steep hill to get to the station, and travel about 20 miles before the train actually goes under the ground. There is still a water-tower, a reminder of the days of steam trains, and there must still be water in it, because in the summer you can see bullrushes growing there.

It is a pretty little town, with a proper high street that still has independent shops, and a market twice a week. There used to be a market hall, too, but only the clock tower remains, as the main building was demolished a number of years ago. There is a medieval parish church, and wide range of other places of worship; Methodist, Roman Catholic, United Reformed, Salvation Army, Spiritualist and two Baptist churches (there used to be three) as well as a mosque. The local branch library is not very big, but it has a good family history and local history section. But the best place to start if you want to know about the town's history is Chesham Museum. Their site has a great collection of photographs and links to lots of other useful resources. One of the most interesting is the Roll of Honour listing the names of Chesham men who fell in the two world wars, with biographical details for most of them.

Chesham War Memorial - Remembrance Day parade 2010

Chesham was in the registration district of Amersham, from 1837 until 1974, since when it has been part of the Buckinghamshire district. Registration districts were based on Poor Law Unions, formed in 1834 by amalgamating groups of parishes. The Union Workhouse and the administration of the Union were usually based in the largest parish in the Union. In 1834 Chesham was much the largest of the parishes concerned, but the Poor Law Commissioners judged that the parish workhouse in Chesham was badly run, so the new Union was based on Amersham instead. When the paupers in the old parish workhouse were moved to Amersham in 1835, there was riot in the streets of Chesham. There is an account of this and more about the history of Amersham Union on Peter Higginbottom's wonderful The Workhouse site.

Parish church of St Mary, Chesham

Most of the records for Chesham are held at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies in Aylesbury, but those for the various nonconformist churches and chapels are at The National Archives in record series RG4 and RG 6. They can be searched and downloaded from the BMDregisters site. Another good way of finding out about Chesham, its records, and where they are held is by entering it as a search term on England Jurisdictions 1851 which is part of FamilySearch. 

The George and Dragon

For general information, maps and population statistics there is A Vision of Britain Through Time and you will find pictures of listed buildings on the Images of England site. This last works better if you register (free of charge) to use the advanced search facility. 

The listed buildings include the George and Dragon (left) in the High Street. Quite a number of pubs all over the country have closed in recent years, including this one, but fortunately it has recently re-opened under new management; it's much too attractive to be empty and unused.

Finally, I haven't forgotten about the 'Boots, brushes and Baptists' part of the title, above. This is something I was told by the estate agent when I was looking at houses here, and it reflects some of the main features of the town's history. I've already explained the 'Baptists' part, and two of the main local industries were the manufacture of small wood items, especially brushes, and boot making. You can see this for yourself by browsing the census for Chesham, where you will see that much of the population was engaged in one of these occupations. You might also notice that many of the women worked in lace-making or straw-plaiting, but neither of these starts with B so it wouldn't be such a snappy title if they were included.

 

Do you love libraries?

I certainly do, and I can't remember a time when libraries were not a big part of my life.

This Saturday, 5 February is Save our Libraries Day. and there are lots of things you can do to show your support, even if you only have a few minutes to spare. I will be doing my bit online, because I won't be able to visit my local library in person on Saturday. This is because I have to be at work.

Luckily for me, though, work involves spending the day in a building where there is a wonderful library (shameless plug - if you are visiting The National Archives in person, don't forget the check out the Library, it's probably bigger than you thought).

One of my earliest memories involves a library, and not just any library, it was the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. I must have been about four years old when my dad took me there, and I must have already been  used to going to our local Langside Library and borrowing books. I know this because my memory of the Mitchell is a) being really impressed at seeing so many books and b) yelling the place down with disappointment when I found out that I couldn't borrow any of them! This was the old marble hall part of the library, quite possibly the staircase, where there is a really good echo

We moved to Wootton Wawen, Warwickshire when I was 7, and lived in Wootton Hall - there is a picture of it in an earlier post. Mum and I wanted to find out about the history of this amazing building, so we went to Henley-in-Arden Library nearby and found a book on the history of the village, which told us that our flat used to be the Bishop's Rooms. I may write about that sometime.

The following year we moved to Gillingham in Kent, and I spent a lot of time in Gillingham Library, first of all in the Children's Library, a wonderful traditional high-ceilinged room with murals of scenes from 'Wind in the Willows' where a clock in one of the pictures was a real working clock. I graduated to the adult library, and also enjoyed the temporary exhibitions in the library, but I particularly loved the reference library upstairs. I may be the only person to have bunked off school to spend more time in the library!

As a student I was first introduced to the Library of Congress classification system used in the University of Warwick Library, but the university and its library were still pretty new back then, so when I had a serous research project to do, I used the fabulous Birmingham Central Library. This was where I first experience the thrill of doing original research for myself, and there is nothing quite like it (hands up who agrees with me on that!).

I took a long break from education, and did the motherhood thing too. And what did I do when I discovered that Firstborn was on the way? I went to Hendon Library and borrowed some baby books of course! When we moved a few miles to a bigger house I joined Harrow Libraries, borrowing books and  vinyl records - remember them? I attended evening classes in more than one branch library, and when I took up family history I used the Local Studies collection in the Civic Centre Reference Library.

Once the family history thing had really kicked in, I helped my local family history put on an exhibition in the library, and carried on with evening classes in libraries in Harrow and elsewhere, only this time I was teaching them. I don't teach any more, but I do a lot of talks to family history societies and other groups, who often meet in...libraries!

Now I live in lovely, leafy Buckinghamshire, within walking distance of Chesham Library, and my library card gives me access to all kinds of wonderful online sources, as well as the books, DVDs and other facilities in the library itself. So far, Chesham Library is not under threat, but others in the county are, and the Friends of Stony Stratford Library, at the other end of the county mounted a brilliant campaign, which got massive media coverage. The author, Philip Pullman made an eloquent defence of Oxfordshire libraries at a meeting on 20 January at Oxford Town Hall, which is worth reading in full.

I can't imagine how my life would have been without all the libraries I have known and loved. The way I have used them over the years has changed, but they are still essential to me. I am very pleased to say that both Firstborn and his younger brother have turned out to be avid readers (and they both write well, too), and my lifelong library addiction must have had some influence there. My elderly mother, who passed on the habit to me, still makes regular trips to her local branch library, which is within walking distance of her house, even though she needs her walking stick to get there these days.