Whilst searching for new relatives and the ever-hopeful link to relatives still living in Germany, I was also filling out what I knew of my Grandad’s Siblings.

My Grandad was the second youngest of 11. Nine had made it to adulthood with two sadly dying at birth. All his brothers were older than him and they all fought in WW1. My Grandad was born in 1901 so he was just too young to sign up. (He did however join the Navy after WW1 and went on to join the RAF during WW2).

What I didn’t realise is that the majority of young men with German heritage who signed up to fight had to fight in what was called the ‘Kaisers regiment’. The law was if you were born in England and one of your parents was ‘foreign’ even if you had never travelled to your parent’s birth country, you were considered foreign yourself and couldn’t be trusted. This was also the case for spouses of anyone born abroad, and to be honest my immediate family were lucky not to be deported back to Germany or be placed in Internment camps. Which is what I discovered had happened to the descendants of extended family members who had emigrated to England.

One brother was captured by the German Army and spent most of the war in one prisoner of war camp or another. The family story goes – that so little was known about his whereabouts or even if he was still alive during or just after the war that his ‘widow’ was on the point of marrying someone else when he turned up unannounced weeks before the wedding.

Sadly, Grandad’s youngest sister had died during the Spanish Flu epidemic just after the war, she was only recently married and was pregnant with her first child. It really affected my Grandad as he adored her, she was the sibling he was closest to.

One sister married and had four children and then her husband was sadly killed in a car accident caused by his son. I was always told by my Mum that her uncle and cousin had been arguing about which junction to take off the road they were travelling on. They ended up crashing as a result and the son ended up going to court for causing death by dangerous driving. I have never been able to find any court records to prove this, but after this horrific accident my Great Aunt emigrated to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her children.

Another older sister married an American and as she couldn’t have any children of her own took on a younger sister to raise to aid her parents.

Two of Grandad’s brothers emigrated to Canada on their return to England after demobilisation, and it was their grandchildren who I’d made contact with from my Gran’s address book.

One Great Uncle has remained a mystery to this day, I think he fought in WW1, but due to the damage of WW1 records I can’t prove this. My Gran was told a couple of stories either that he was blown up in WW1 or that he was Winston Churchill’s chauffeur but got killed in a bomb. Neither of which stories can be proved, I think I found him on some immigration records entering USA as a chauffeur to an American, but this is where the trail disappears.

One brother, (the oldest of all the siblings) remained in England but sadly died only a couple of years after the war, this was due to serious health conditions brought on by being gassed in the WW1 trenches. This was one story my Mum did know and told me about it when I studied War Poetry as part of my English A Level. Wilfred’s Owen poem ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ about being gassed felt so very poignant and really hit home.

Finally, the last brother became a Prize Fighter and a lovely person on a genealogical forum sent me a photo of him posing with his gloves on. He later became a carpenter and my aunt mentioned visiting his workshop with her dad and brother when she was little. She said they called him Uncle Charlie but had no idea he was actually their uncle, their dad’s brother. I thought this was a bit odd but it’s just more proof of my Grandad not talking about his family and how distant they were from each other.

Then came my personal research Gold Dust – a distant family member in Germany had seen the message I’d posted on one of the German genealogical forums and contacted me.