Six letters on a war memorial

I shall miss the Remembrance Day parade in Chesham this year, because I will be thousands of miles away in Florida, embarking on the Wholly Genes cruise. But I will still be thinking of those who served, and in particular of those who died, in the two World Wars and other conflicts.

I have one direct ancestor, my great-great grandfather Thomas Cross, who died in the First World War, and until fairly recently I knew very little about him. It wasn't for the want of trying, but he was an Irishman in the merchant navy, and he died at sea, which makes him hard to find on three counts. I knew this much from information given to me by family members, but finding any documentary proof was another matter.

When the Commonwealth War Graves website went live a number of years ago, I didn't even think of looking for him there, because I was taking the 'graves' part of the title too literally. But of course it also includes the names of those who died at sea, or who have no known grave, but who are commemorated on a war memorial. So when I finally looked, his entry was easy to find, and I discovered that he was commemorated on the war memorial at Plymouth Hoe. I had been there many years ago when I was in my teens, unaware of my family connection with the place.

TNA ref: ADM 137/3690

I have been able to find out a great deal about Thomas's death, but very little about his life. He appears on the birth and marriage certificates of his children, but was always away at sea at census time, although he did finally make an appearance at home in Glasgow in 1911 (which I found and downloaded within minutes of the 1911 census going live!). He and my great-great grandmother are supposed to have married on 29 April in Dublin, but there's no record of it in Irish civil registration. No age is given for him in his Commonwealth War Graves entry, so I could only guess at his age until I found him in the census. He was 55 in 1911, which puts him in his 60s when he died in 1917. A bit old for war service, but as a merchant seaman he was caught up in it. His ship, the Ermine, was commandeered by the Royal Navy as a fleet messenger, and he was one of 14 men who were missing, presumed dead, when the ship was torpedoed in August 1917.

When I said I knew a lot about his death, I really meant it. He has three death certificates; in Naval War Deaths (Royal Navy) and Marine Deaths (civilian) in the General Register Office for England and Wales. But since he was normally resident in Scotland, notification of his death was sent there too. I even found a whole report on the torpedo incident that cost him his life, in the records of the Admiralty. The report is 32 pages long, and goes into a lot of detail. The page on the right lists everyone who was on board, survivors, dead, and missing.

An ever sadder postscript to the story is the effect of his death on his widow, Jane. Her first husband was a soldier, who died in 1878, leaving her with four young children. She had four more children with Thomas, but two of them died very young. She can't have expected to become a war widow this late in life. I was told by one of her grandchildren that she couldn't take it in, and the family would find her in the middle of the night, standing on the street corner waiting for her Tommy to come home. She died less than two years later, of a cerebral haemorrhage according to her death certificate, but maybe 'broken heart' would be more apt.

Three years ago I was able to visit Plymouth again, and this time I went to the war memorial to look for his name. There are a LOT of names on that memorial; the original memorial is for those who died in the First World War, encircled by another for the Second World War. But I found him, and there he is, with all the other seamen, listed alphabetically, year by year, section by section. He is listed in 'Mercantile Marine, Engineers Services'. Just six little letters among so many, CROSS T, and every one of them has a story.

We will remember them

 

Commonwealth War Graves Registers on Ancestry - worth the trouble?

When I saw that these records had been added to Ancestry, I wondered what the point was, since the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site already has all this information, and it is completely free. It also has cemetery plans, and all sorts of other information, including printable certificates for each casualty. But of course I had to have a closer look, just in case there was something there that I was missing. The results were quite interesting.

Plymouth Naval Memorial  

The Commonwealth War Graves site has a single database for all services and nationalities, and for both world wars. The records recently added to Ancestry.com are for the First world War only, and comprise two separate databases. First there is the 'British Commonwealth War Graves Register 1914-1918' which contains entries from only about 250 cemeteries in three countries; most of them are in France, with a few in Belgium and Iraq. The source is the series of books printed by the Imperial War Graves Commission (as it was called then) in the 1920s. I compared a number of entries in these books with their equivalents on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) site, and found no differences, except that in a few cases the printed books said 'killed in action', 'died of wounds' or 'died of disease', which did not appear on the website. I did find one entry where the CWGC gave the wrong date - 1916 instead of 1918 - but the correct date was in the book.

So there doesn't seem to be any great advantage in using Ancestry for these war deaths, beyond the outside chance of finding a entry that had been mis-transcribed by the CWGC. We can already check 'Soldiers Died in the Great War' for place of birth and place of enlistment, a database which is available on more than one site. But there is one advantage to using Ancestry; not for the information it gives, but for the search engine. If you put a place name in the Keyword(s) box you can find men from a particular town, and the name search finds names of next of kin as well as the fallen soldiers - try putting in female names and you will see what I mean.

The second set of records is 'UK, Royal Navy and Royal Marine War Graves Roll, 1914-1919' and for all the entries that I compared provides more detail than the CWGC. This often includes next of kin information, and exact birthdate where the CWGC just gives an age at death. I also found a number of cases where the CWGC gave only initials, but Ancestry's database provides full names. So this is definitely worth using, even if you have already found and entry for your sailor or marine on the CWGC site - with a couple of exceptions. First of all, the men listed are in the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines, but not the Merchant Navy, although I found a member of my own family there who was a merchant seaman, but whose ship had been commandeered by the Royal Navy, so there should be others like him.  Ancestry's description of the records suggests that the database contains records of Royal Navy and Royal Marines officers, but I could only find records of other ranks. One section of the description refers to the War Office, and seems to apply to the Army rather than the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, whose records were kept by the Admiralty. I will need to investigate further to get to the bottom of this. Watch this space.