Monday, January 24, 2011

My great-uncle George has died

It was 92 years ago, but I've only just heard about it.

Having overcome my dislike of lulu.com, I did a search for the name 'Pridmore', to see if any of my perennially-unproductive namesakes have self-published a book too. Not much joy on that front (there are quite a few Pridmores in the world, but most of them prefer to labour in obscurity all their lives and never show up on the internet or the bookshelves), but I did find a seller of World War I photos and obituaries, which provided something extremely cool!

Remember my 1911-census obsession of last year, which included this bloggery about my then-ten-year-old granddad, also involving his older brother George Harry, 14-year-old chemist's errand boy. I'd sort of wondered what happened to him, seeing as my dad was named after him and thus his name filtered down through the years into my middle name...

Well, here's what I found on Lulu today:


22 years old when he died, and just a couple of months before the end of the war, too. What's really fascinating, though, is that he was an officer! Just a 2nd Lieutenant, but even so, that's pretty good for a young man apparently without any education after the age of 14 and from a family consisting entirely of rank and file types! Must've been the brains of the family.

Also, although he's got the dark hair and big nose of the Pridmore clan, he's got a longer, thinner face than most of my relatives. But he has got the same hairline I had at that age...

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