Finally, a little success and a kick in the teeth

Yesterday I spoke of the frustration I felt when so many of the enquiries I was presented with constantly came up against brick walls. MOD bombed out in WW2 or not, it made it very easy to become disenchanted with my lot.

However, today I had a good experience today, one that helped restore a little of the enthusiasm that i lost yesterday. My supervisor handed me a copy of an email he received through the usual channels to find the an uncle who had served with the regiment in WW1 and I went about the usual way of trying to track down this soldier in our records.

Normally, at this point, i'd head upstairs to the archive and find squat, but today I found far more than I expected. When i found the soldier's records through his unique serial number, the file in which I was searching was stuffed with hand drawn trench maps and letters from various officers at the front to the regimental headquarters. It wasn't just the feel of these nearly century old papers in my hands that got me, it was their relevance to the search I was carrying out, and the job i'd been assigned to do.

The guy's uncle turned out to have been present at a small-scale yet very significant engagement for the regiment, and within the files I found maps of the region it took place in; aerial reconnaissance photos of the moon-scape at the front, with barely recognisable features circled or labelled. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks, there was me bitching because I couldn't find the right file or find the service record of one man among a thousand. When you're surrounded by artifacts, it's strange but true to say that you sometimes forget the circumstances that forged these objects. As I leafed through the ancient, flaking paperwork, meticulously typed by a man in a dugout, I remembered why it was I wanted to do this work in the first place, it was to find men like this man's uncle, even if I only managed to find one in every four men I was asked to find, and feel the weight of history in my hands as I touched those papers. On a sad note though, when I got home and searched for the two villages that were featured in the reports: Rouex and Famboux neither Google nor the infinitely wise Wikipedia had ever heard of them, they, like so many of the men who died there, have been simply forgotten.

Needless to say, my zeal has been replenished. It was a high note of success today, and i'll try to recall that feeling whenever I feel dispondent in my search, and Keep Buggering On.