My late mother, then Elizabeth Willett, was almost 14 in June 1944. In her memoirs she wrote of her memories of D-Day. She was away at boarding school in Sherborne, Dorset.
(more…)During the night of the 5th – 6th of June 1944, everyone in my house was woken by the staff and prefects to watch the gliders being towed over to Normandy at the start of D-Day.
On this day 100 years ago (26th April 1918) my Grandfather, Harold Faulder, climbed out of a trench near Ypres leading his company across no man’s land towards the German lines. He did not return and his body was never recovered.
A previous post had detailed his career. Today I am looking at what we know about the night of 25th/26th April and the early morning of 26th April 1918. (more…)
This post was former titled William Blizard Williamson “of Cork” and was significantly editted in 2026.
One of my brick walls has been William Blizard Williamson, his family and their ancestry;
The younger son, George Henry was the father of Elizabeth Ann Willett who with her husband Everard William Willett adopted my mother, which makes William Blizard Williamson (senior) my Great Great Grandfather (by adoption).
Another post, Williamson Antecedents in England, details the above genealogy. This post deals with ancestry in Ireland.
This posts summarises what is and is not known about this family and what can be done to break down this brick wall! Essentially we know little about their Irish life or of their ancestors in Ireland.
(more…)Elsewhere I have written about Wilfred Willett and how his wife rescued him when he was left for near-dead in a Base Hospital in Boulogne. He had been injured on 13 December 1914 when crawling out into no-mans land to assist one of his men who had been shot.
I now read of an incident involving his brother Lewis Willett. It caught my eye because my mother was adopted by a Willett and was consequently a cousin once removed of Wilfred and Lewis. (more…)
I have split my current discussion of the Willetts of Colchester into two posts:
This article is fairly long and detailed – a briefer post about Willett Antecedents summarises some of the relationships.
(more…)The purpose of this post is to collate comments of the type “Are We Related .. to the Willett family” (as detailed on this blog)”. This is one of a group of pages collating “Are we related” type comments, which are intended to either:
Where comments have been moved from another post I have inserted a reference to the original post. I have also inserted a summary and link to any work I have done on the suggested relationships.
Richard van Emden will be publishing a book later this year about the Great War families left without a father or husband. Although stories of members of our family do not feature, some may recognise the cover.
The picture was taken at Tyne Cot in the 1920s by Marjorie Faulder, widow of Harold Faulder, and shows my father pointing out his father’s name.
A friend of the author saw the picture when I used it to illustrate a post on the Great War Forum and consequently Richard Van Emden approached me asking if he could use the image. My brother and I agreed (almost two and a half years ago).
(more…)(This post is more in the nature of a genealogy diary entry or research note discussing a potential line of interesting research.)
Google in their attempt to “capture all information”, have been digitalising huge numbers of mainly out of copyright books (more than 5.2 million). Now they have introduced a tool to try and analyse this corpus of data: Google NGrams. This allows you to graph by date of publication the occurrence of a word (or even selection of words).
So for a genealogist, the logical thing to do is ego-surf – stick your own surname in the tool and see what comes out. (more…)
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