TOPIC:

I'd just like to say thanks for an interesting new resource (new to me, of course). I often help people on various internet forums with their family history searches, and mention that their English ancestors who go missing from the 1901 census can sometimes be found in the IY or other branches of the military in connection with the Second Anglo-Boer War. Kevin Asplin's site lists IY members, but it's nice to know somewhere that expert knowledge on other branches of the military that were there can be found.

I stumbled on this site from a completely different angle this week, while doing an internet search for a particular name in connection with an on-line friend's family history; the tale is here: H D Watson


My own connection to this war is very peripheral; in fact, I have very little military in recent generations, other than a great-uncle killed in the atrocity that was WWI, three weeks before it ended. I did have a grx3 grandfather who signed up on Christmas Eve, 1814, at the age of 17. How drunk, hungry, deluded or coerced would someone have had to be? And one grandfather whose doings I'm not really proud of -- but not because he was discharged ignominiously from a rather élite regiment at the age of 16, for fencing stolen goods; he turned around and re-enrolled in the same regiment under a slightly different name (a common practice), got a battlefield commission a decade later in WWI, and unfortunately stuck around afterward to "serve" in Ireland after the war and into the 1920s. But he was too young for the A-B War.

So all I knew about this war, for a very long time, came from seeing the Shirley Temple movie version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess when I was very young (the original book didn't involve the war), and hearing the mysterious words "The Relief of Mafeking" that stayed with me, even though I had no idea what they meant until much more recently.

What I did find, as my personal connection, came from researching a great-grandfather who turned out to be a man of mystery. By matching a theory formed from info found through the magic of genealogical databases and search engines up with a little snippet of oral family history finally passed on, I learned he had joined the British military after his first wife's death and then had said goodbye to it after five years in India, in the late 1870s, rather than be sent to join in the Second Afghan War. And then changed his name to the only name his family has known and gone by since then. Once that was sorted out, I found he had a sister. And she had a son. Whom I found in Kevin Asplin's IY list just on a random google -- which was how I discovered that site. (The nephew's wealthy uncle, my gr-grfather's sister's brother-in-law, was also there in the IY, as a major, at the age of about 42.)

On a hunch that the nephew may have stayed in SA (since I certainly could find no trace of him elsewhere), I searched the SA National Archives, and actually found him, asking the same question of local authorities there in 1907 that I was asking a century later: has anybody seen my father lately?

Where that father (and his wife, my gr-grfather's sister) got to is still anybody's guess. But a few years later, I did one of my periodic searches in on-line family trees to see whether the surname (as close to unique as they come) had shown up anywhere yet, and bingo, a living descendant was in someone's tree. And my theory was correct: my gr-grfather's nephew had indeed stayed in SA, and had descendants who are now in the US (whom I have found) and, apparently, in Scotland (and we all need something to keep searching for!).

The unfortunate thing is that after doing all the finding and figuring out, I did some more googling and found the nephew's Anglo-Boer War medal at an auction site on line -- having been sold five years earlier, at a time when I did not even know of the nephew's existence. Oh darn, the web page is still there but the photo of the medal is gone and I don't think I saved it at the time. I contacted Bosley's, the auction house, and they passed my request for info about its provenance on to the collector who had bought it, but I heard nothing back.

I guess I need to post the description of the medal in the appropriate subforum here to see what I can learn!

Apart from that, the war is, to me, really just an example of the horrible imperialist adventures my ancestors and so many others got dragged and propagandized into being part of, and sacrificed in, for the profit of Empire. (Not to say that the Dutch/Afrikaaners were any better as imperialists.) The atrocities committed by the British military in the war were appalling in themselves, and were then exploited by Afrikaaner leaders in the same way the treatment of Germany post-WWI was exploited by German leaders, and with similar effects for their respective victims in the later 20th century, when the victims became the victimizers. All in all, a lot more ignominious than my teenaged grandfather's exploits.

I've just been doing a little more googling and I guess I now need to read up on Emily Hobhouse (and I see I can start at this very site).

If I run across any genealogical puzzles I may be able to help with while visiting here, I will be very happy to give it a try.

Janey

Thank you for your interesting post.

The Internet and genealogical investigations have transformed the lives of people like me who have an interest in the ordinary men and women who played their small parts in the grand canvas of military history. With only their medals or other small clues to hand, the long-untold stories of their lives come to light again. These people may be gone, but they are no longer forgotten.

Regards
Brett

Janey,

Thank you for a really interesting introductory post. It sounds like you are a very diligent researcher.

Medals have a habit of turning up on the market over time so I hope one day the medal and you can be united.

Best wishes
David

Brett -- ain't it the truth? If it weren't for resources on line, I still wouldn't even know what my mother's family's real name is, or even have doubted the one they think it is.

Another example I have from a recent idle google search -- for my mother's uncle, the one killed in the dying days of WWI (aged 34 and unmarried, so my mother and I and her brother, his namesake, keep his memory alive). New old stuff appears on line all the time, so it's always worth a fresh look. This time, I found a two-year-old article about a church in an Ontario city that was looking for family members of a dozen men on its honour roll about whom they had no information ... one of whom was my great-uncle. So I was able to do just what you say: bring the long-untold story of his life to light again for them.

And the interesting people one meets along the way -- like in that HD Watson thread: someone in England and someone in Vancouver, both of whom are just really great people, neither of whom I'm related to and neither of whom I would ever have had any occasion to meet otherwise -- but because I happened to run into the first one on line after I had chanced to run into a mistranscribed ancestor of his and corrected his census record out of pique more than anything -- and then years later connected up something he had said with what the second one was searching for -- a 96-yr-old woman in Vancouver is now in touch with a cousin in England she had never known of.

And that's only because of the magic of the google mail search engine itself, which dug up an old email of mine I hadn't thought about in years, and only when I was searching for something totally different in the first place. (All of this, of course, raises the question of how much info is too much info, and whether we are really designed to cope with it all when we have to rely on search engines for our memory!)

Karma, kismet and serendipity are what sometimes make the hard work pay off.


djb -- I have posted up that medal info now, figuring it's my turn for some of that karma!

I'm going to add this here although there may be a better place to put it that someone can direct me to.

The Canadian government maintains the Virtual War Memorial on line, and it can be searched for the names of any Canadian who died in a war or conflict or on peacekeeping duties starting with the Anglo-Boer War.

www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/collections/virtualmem

The individual records link to images of the Books of Remembrance, which are on display in the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, with a page being turned each day.

Today's Honour Roll for this date showed no casualties before WWI, so I searched rather randomly for surnames, and surnames starting with Wil found me a result. I'm just going to post that page here as an example of the memorial entries.

Anyone with family members who were killed in the Anglo-Boer War as part of the Canadian forces will want to have a copy of the person's page -- and any collector or researcher with a Canadian medal from that war or some other interest in someone killed in it would of course want to have it as well.

Wilcocks G C George Apr 9, 1901
In memory of
Trooper
GEORGE WILCOCKS
who died on April 9, 1901
Force: Army
Unit: South African Constabulary
Commemorated on Page 44 of the South African War Book of Remembrance