Is Remembrance now just a photo shoot?

Those who know me will know that I am not a jingoist of any kind so I make no apology for returning to the subject of remembering the dead of the first world war.
Visiting Tyne Cot Cemetery this week I was appalled to say the least at the sight of young people climbing about on the central memorial cross just to have their photos taken.
I spoke to one of the guides who told me that the steps on the base of the cross where designed to be used for that.  She said that when King George V visited the cemetery he wanted to stand on the place where so many allied soldiers had stood.
I pointed out that standing on that spot reflecting on the dead of war was a world away from using a memorial as a platform for photographs.
She replied "You are entitled to your opinion."

The first time we visited Tyne Cot, we were almost alone there and it was a moving experience.  Unfortunately this time it was almost impossible to think of it in quite the same way.

Hopefully after 2018 this place will return to being a place of remembrance and not the tourist venue that it appears to be today.

A hundred years ago

Frederick Feston died just over one hundred years ago on 25th October 1917. One of the casualties of the Third battle of Ypres that they called Passchendaele.  Not the only one who died that day so it is all too easy to lump them all together as casualties and forget that each of them was an individual: son, father or husband.

Fred Feston is a real man to us even though we never knew him. His daughters never knew him,   the first only a baby and the second born after he died. His widow remarried so his memory gradually faded.

We know him because of our interest in family history and we have been able to piece together his life before the war and the events surrounding his few brief months in the army in France before he disappeared into the mud of Flanders.  No grave-just a name inscribed on a long wall among so many others and an entry in  memorial book.

The Third Battle of Ypres ended at the beginning of November, too late for Fred Feston and for close to three quarters of a million men who died there in less than a month.  In a poem, Sigfried Sassoon put it "I died in Hell, they called it Passchendaele."

In Flanders field

July 2017 marks the centenary of the Third battle of Ypres  By most definitions one of the bloodiest and controversial of all the dreadful battles of the First world war  By November the battle had gained very little for the allies but had cost the lives of close to a quarter of a million men, with debatably a similar number of German soldiers.

We shall be visiting the Tyne Cot Cemetery this October which is one of the largest of the Ypres salient. It contains the graves of 11,961 British and Commonwealth soldiers including close to 600 Australians, 450 Canadians and close to 200 from New Zealand. There is an astonishing number 8373 graves of men whose names are not known and whose headstone bears the inscription "A soldier of the great war.  Known unto God"   

There were over thirtyfive thousand men who were  never found or identified, most lost in the mud. Their names, including that of our grandfather Frederick Feston, at least are known and  are inscribed on a memorial wall 150 metres long.

War cemeteries like Tyne Cot are never easy to visit. They are not places of possible quiet contemplation like many a village churchyard in England.  The serried rows of stark white headstones appearing to stretch into the distance defy any attempt to view them without emotion even though they record events which occurred a century ago.

Another World War One Book?

If you go to Amazon Books and type in "World War One" you will get over 19000 hits, yes that is right over nineteen thousand or nearly twenty thousand probably in a week or three.

 

So why am I going to suggest that if your are a family historian you should write another one ?

My simple answer, is you can and you should.

If you have an ancestor, Grandfather or Great grandfather, uncles or granduncles who served or died in the the first world war then they deserve to be remembered, not just en masse on Remembrance Sunday but as individuals.
I think there are three main reasons why a family historian or genealogist should write up their family histories in a narrative and there are no doubt others.



First, don’t waste your research.
You have spent a lot of time and effort and perchance a fair bit of money in the process of finding out about your ancestors. It would be a great shame and a waste for it not to be recorded in a way that will be understandable to others, particularly your present day family, who, quite often, do not appear to be particularly interested.

Secondly your ancestors deserve it
Your great grandparents, or whichever part of your family you decide to focus on, should not be left unheard of and unremembered. You have the capacity and the knowledge to record their lives, so that future generations will know of their forbears.

Finally no one else will do it
The chances are no-one else is going to write a book about your ancestors, so it is up to you. Not only can you do it, you should. Consider the alternatives, many years of work recorded in a gedcom on a CD, or a loose-leaf binder full of Family Group Sheets, Descendant charts and so on. Most regard that as being a “no contest” compared to a printed book.

So get down to it and write the story of that one soldier amongst all the others, he was an individual, not just one of the dreadful statistics of the "Great War", a man with a family, mother, wife,children, siblings, all making him unique.  He needs to be remembered not just as an entry  on a group sheet but in words that your family will understand and appreciate.