Recent holiday with WW1 connections

by James | Nov 24, 2012 | Uncategorised

Most people get on a plane or a train and head off to the sun or the snow to relax, well this really is not us.

Our recent holiday saw us driving through Europe spending some relaxing! time in Austria and then heading back. The interest to our readers of this kind of wacky race around Europe comes in some of the places we visited.

I our first day we visited another 6 Commonwealth War Graves sites around Loos, Arras and the Somme. This has been an ongoing project of ours that was born out of the research we are carrying out into the names of the men on the Morton War Memorial. One thing we always wanted to do was turn the names into real people and as part of this we set out our goal and decided that as we could never meet these people, the next best thing would be visiting their graves or memorials.

At the start of our holiday we realised that out of the sixteen names on the memorial we currently had visited only eight. One name is commemorated in Gallipoli, Turkey and one we could not find out who he was, so that leaves us with six more that are all in northern France.

So, here we are on day one of our holiday planning to visit four of our fellow Morton Lads but as luck would have it we caught an earlier Eurotunnel train, allowing us an extra couple of hours. In the end we were able to visit all six on the one day.

The cemeteries and men in question are listed below and each contains a link to the photographs we took at each (Click on the cemetery) and our history page for each man (Click on the soldier’s name)

• Bois-Grenier Communal Cemetery – Pte George Plowright

• Rue-Des-Berceaux Military Cemetery – Pte Arthur Ashton

• Cambrin Military Cemetery – Lance Corporal James Wright (sorry no history on our site yet)

• Loos British Cemetery – Private John James Booth

• The Thiepval Memorial – Private John Taylor (sorry no history on our site yet)

• Gordon Dump Cemetery – 2nd Lieutenant William Swift

The start of Blogging…

by James | Nov 24, 2012 | Uncategorised

Ok Folks, well we have arrived at a blog. Why? you may ask.

Well we are constantly adding to our research that is carried out for our hobby of history. Over the years interested people have asked questions about our research, many comment about the lack of updates on the www.jamieandsue.co.uk website, many don’t know that we have Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts that may or may not get regular updates. Our family history research can be found on Ancestry.co.uk, our photos on Flickr, our travels on Facebook and our occasional thoughts and tidbits on Twitter. No one media is best for getting the varied and sometimes small information that we track down communicated to our families, friends and fellow researchers that may be interested

This blog will hopefully be used to keep people up to date with our latest breakthroughs, travels, research and the occasional off topic piece of information that may help others with their research.

A bit of background then?….
Originally we started out with family research for a family tree and over the year have been sidetracked into Local History, Military history and generally researching anything of interest.

Currently the following topics appear in our research:-

• Sue’s family story
• Jamie’s family story
• Morton and Hanthorpe village history
• The Morton War Memorial