A rather poignant thing happened today. Many years ago my mother told me about her Aunt Clara’s son. She said that Aunt Clara was unable to have children and her sister, who had 12 already had another baby and gave it to her. Clara and her husband Sam adored their little boy. Sadly he was called up in the second world war and died in a submarine. That is what Mum told me.
Years later, when I began researching the family tree, I wanted to find his details and his war record to put on the family tree. Mum had passed away by then and so had Great Aunt Clara. Another cousin said his name had been Raymond but that was all I could find out. I searched for a birth registered in Clara’s sister’s married name but could not find one. I also searched for his war record but found nothing.
When the 1939 register became available I found Auntie Clara and Uncle Sam but the third name was hidden because anyone born less than 100 years ago and with no death registered in this country may still be alive.
When the 1921 census was released I found Clara and Sam alone so Raymond was born later than that. It was then that I noticed that Clara’s sister would have been in her early 50s by then and her last previous birth was more than 10 years before. I began to think Mum had the story wrong. I considered Sam’s sisters but they, too, were in their early 50s. Clara’s other sisters were younger but either unmarried or recently married. I searched all of their names anyway but nothing came up.
Then, fairly recently I checked and found that the blacked out name on the 1939 register had been uncovered. The transcript read Herbert L Freeman age 14 followed by his date of birth. That was odd, he had Clara and Sam’s surname but I had been told his name was Raymond. Looking closely at the original document the L could just be an R but I still didn’t have his birth surname. I tried looking for his war record again under Herbert but still found nothing.
I have been thinking about him over the last 2 days as I always do at the time of Remembrance Day. He was the only member of our family to have been lost in the second world war. Then this morning I had a brainwave. I now had his date of birth. There is one genealogy site where you can search on first name and place and year of birth. I went there and pulled out all of the Herbert’s born 1925 in and near where my aunt and her family lived. The very first record to come up was Herbert Raymond White. White was the surname of Auntie Clara’s mother’s second husband. Was there a half sister I had never heard of who could be Raymond’s mother? but that was unlikely, my cousin had the family bible with all of the names in and I had seen it.
I opened the record and there under place of birth was the address of Clara’s parents, my great grandparents, Thomas and Elizabeth Lee. The family continued to live there after Clara’s father died and Elizabeth remarried to William White. This baby’s father’s name was Thomas. Then I remembered that William had a son Thomas from his first marriage. The mother on the record was Alice I checked and William’s son Thomas did marry an Alice.
Mum hadn’t got the story quite right. It wasn’t her sister who had a baby for Clara, it was her step brother’s wife. What a gift to give to someone who isn’t even a blood relation.
So I looked in the war records again under Raymond’s birth name and I found him. Of course, adoptions were unofficial then so, although he normally went by his adopted parents surname, he would have been called up under his birth name. He didn’t die on a submarine, it was a ship that went down. He was 19 years old.
I have his details at last, I found them today, Remembrance Day and four days after the one hundredth anniversary of his birth.
RIP cousin Raymond. My mother told me about you, you are on the family tree at last, you are not forgotten.
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