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The Ghost Road...
2009.02.18
This is a strange little tale, and absolutely true.
While I was in Belgium last weekend I decided to take a tour round the World War 1 battlefields in the vicinity of Ypres. I have always been fascinated by that period in history so this opportunity was too good to miss.
One of the first places we visited was Tyne Cot cemetery...
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This is a strange little tale, and absolutely true.
While I was in Belgium last weekend I decided to take a tour round the World War 1 battlefields in the vicinity of Ypres. I have always been fascinated by that period in history so this opportunity was too good to miss.
One of the first places we visited was Tyne Cot cemetery...
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...it’s an awe-inspiring place, almost overwhelming in the horror it commemorates.
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...it’s an awe-inspiring place, almost overwhelming in the horror it commemorates.
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It is the single largest Commonwealth military cemetery in the world.
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It is the single largest Commonwealth military cemetery in the world.
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Here lie individual graves of 12,000 soldiers...
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Here lie individual graves of 12,000 soldiers...
4
...and at the rear of the cemetery is a vast wall with inset alcoves covered in the names of a further 35,000 soldiers with no known grave whose bodies were never found in the sea of mud which so characterised life and death on the Western Front.
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...and at the rear of the cemetery is a vast wall with inset alcoves covered in the names of a further 35,000 soldiers with no known grave whose bodies were never found in the sea of mud which so characterised life and death on the Western Front.
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As I walked beside the wall I turned into one of the bays where more panels of names were inscribed and entirely by chance I saw my family name...
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As I walked beside the wall I turned into one of the bays where more panels of names were inscribed and entirely by chance I saw my family name...
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...now my surname isn’t common and a hundred years ago would have been even less common and yet I stumbled on this single name by chance – the odds were that he must have been some family connection...
H. E. Swatton... a Private in the Middlesex regiment. I was christened in Middlesex – that’s where my grandparents lived. Now I know that my grandfather and his brothers all served in WW1; one of them died in Salonika but I knew none of them had the initials “H.E.”. Ok, so it’s just an odd coincidence I thought.
When I got home I mentioned it to my mother who in turn spoke to my cousin who has been looking into the family tree as a hobby for years. My cousin immediately knew of the inscribed name; she had seen it herself a few years back but here’s the thing, in all her investigations in all the records she has never found any evidence that he ever existed....
it's amazing, how far back you can trace your ancestry. and it's even more interesting when that historical research project starts accidentally - like in your story.
