On Saturday Mrs Friar and I traveled over to RAF Hendon (a side to note to anyone thinking of going the post code/zip code from their website does NOT work with GPS/Sat Nav, they list a different one on their site, as I discovered too late but that is a different story)
The purpose of our visit was to attend a talk on RAF Genealogy, on what resources are available to those either already on this quest or about to start. This was followed by a trip behind the scenes to the reading room to have a look at some historical records.
This is something my wife would like to do to find out more about her Dad. All we have is a box of photographs that he took whist on service. He thoughtfully wrote on the back where they were taken and a year, but that is all we have. We do not have his service number.
We took the pictures along to ask if there was anything in them that might help us get started.
A big point of the talk that came across to me was the importance for future generations of my family, or even future historians who should stumble upon me, was to document MY life. If your looking to trace service personnel, chances are that if the did not die (dead people create paper work) or didn't fly a spitfire or charged across open ground on their own armed only with a sword, records will be VERY hard to track down.
Now I have not served in any arm of the services but my history will be important to someone in the future, I know nothing about my fathers service history and am also going to try to find something about him (he served in the Royal Navy) but if I do not write down my story now, my life, all be it a plain and simple one, will go unrecorded, my mark in history will be lost and reduced to born, married, died. Nothing of the detail will remain.
If you have older generations still alive, talk to them, interview them, find out what they did, even if it was simple, planes do not fly without being fixed, tanks do move without that little washer on the thingy, did your grandmother make that thingy?, troops cant fight without being fed. A line the chap giving the talk used which was given to him by a previous attendee who said we are "personalizing history".
I have nothing of my mother or fathers REAL history, I know a bit but would love to be able now to sit them down and talk about their past. I can not as they have both passed away over 20 years ago, it is only now as I get older than I have learned to appreciate the past, but now is too late.
Looking at her Dads photographs reduced my wife to tears and has also made me realize how much I miss my mum and dad.
I urge you, if you have not done so already, sit your parents, grand parents, elders down and talk to them. I didn't.