During the past month, I have immersed myself in research about two branches of my family about whom I wasn’t familiar. After I connected with distant cousins in South Africa, England and Canada, I learned enough details to help me further my research.
In the case of three men in their twenties, I was stymied by what happened to them. They were in the prime of their life, yet they seemed to have disappeared from the records.
I found their birth records, learned about their siblings and where they all lived, and even looked at the house where one of them grew up. I discovered in the 1940 Toronto city directory one of them had been a shipper for a company, called Instruments. After that, I found no trace of him. I found no trace of the other two.
It wasn’t until relatives told me what happened that I searched for their names on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Canadian Virtual War Memorial websites. I found them. It was a sobering discovery.
The three had been killed in action in their prime of their life.
Herbert William Doe (1894-1916) 22 years old.
Jack Macdonald Jones (1917-1945) 27 years old.
Joseph Henry Haire (1919-1942) 22 years old.
I had just gotten to know them. When I found what happened to them, it was like they had suddenly been taken away.
They had.
As the daughter and granddaughter of veterans from the First and Second World Wars and a long-time genealogist, I should have known where to look. I should have thought about what was going on in the world when they disappeared.
Yes, those discoveries are sobering. I have found a couple of distant cousins who died in WWI after not finding them elsewhere.