While I would like to think that I am fairly successful at family history research, that is only true in general terms. And this blog is not always going to be full of success stories. This post is a case in point. Despite more than 50 years of looking, I really don’t know anything much about this guy. So who is he? And why have I been looking for him?
Well, to put it bluntly, he is my maternal grandfather – my mother’s father. I know his name, and approximately when he was born. I have his medals card, and can therefore trace his military career (he served in the Gloucestershire Regiment and the Machine Gun Corps before re-enlisting in the Glosters). I have his marriage certificate 
to my grandmother. I even have a newspaper article about a court appearance in 1925, shortly after he left her. Finally, I have his re-enlistment paper. You may think this sounds like a lot of information, but it really is very little.
It would be nice to have full access to his army records, but alas, they were destroyed by enemy action during the 2nd World War. It’s ironic, really, because my other grandfather, who I can easily trace in public records, served in a different battalion of the same regiment, and his records survived.
I don’t really know his birth date. Family tradition says 23 November 1890. His marriage certificate suggests 1890, but the re-enlistment papers give credence to the idea that he was born in November 1888, possibly in Galashiels, Selkirkshire. But there are no records to show that he was born within 5 years of those dates anywhere in the United Kingdom.
It’s as if he made everything up. Perhaps he did. And without a birth certificate I have nothing to show who his parents were. Yes, I know the marriage entry gives a father’s name, but if he lied about everything else, why would I believe that name is correct? As a result, a full quarter of my family history is unknowable. There’s always an outside possibility that DNA might help.
with it is somewhat clunky and time-consuming. As a result I was not encouraged to use it a lot. And it doesn’t help that the drivers have never been upgraded from Windows XP, so I have to maintain a really old computer just to be able to use it.
and I still use it occasionally, but it needs to be assembled before use and doesn’t always work as I would expect. Not only that, it doesn’t like the format of English towns. For example, there are several Donningtons in England, so I want to specify the county to avoid confusion. QromaScan doesn’t allow that, so I have to manually change the metadata after scanning which, frankly, is a pain.
year was of a portable scanner called a 