Online sites such as ancestry.com coupled with knowledge held in places such as Wairarapa Archive...has eased the pain enormously and made the chase more achievable.
Online sites such as ancestry.com coupled with knowledge held in places such as Wairarapa Archive...has eased the pain enormously and made the chase more achievable.
Genealogy is a growth industry helped along remarkably in the past few years by online research sites that have made compiling a family tree a piece of cake compared to days of yore.
Once, in order to trace ancestors, you had to be dedicated enough to go through a rigmarole,like posting to Britain's Somerset House or army base records in various locations, that some people found too arduous to attempt.
Online sites such as ancestry.com coupled with knowledge held in places such as Wairarapa Archive and the formation of genealogical societies has eased the pain enormously and made the chase more achievable.
One of the huge spin-offs from the growth of family genealogical searches has been a renewed interest in war history and subsequently a much greater appreciation of just what transpired in the battles that shaped nations, including, of course, World War I and World War II.
This, in turn, has helped keep alive the desire to recognise such momentous historical events as the signing of the armistice at the conclusion of World War I, as witnessed just this week by the young people who came along in Masterton to pay their respects to the fallen, at the cenotaph in Queen Elizabeth Park.
When I was a primary schoolboy the day then known as Armistice Day, which is now called Remembrance Day, was always briefly recognised by children in class being asked to fall silent for two minutes at 11am on November 11 each year.
Then Armistice Day seemed to fall away for some years with not much recognition in the general populous at all. But that has now thankfully been reversed, partly or even largely due I am sure to the renewed interest in genealogy and the realisation answers can be found with relative ease compared to years ago.
The passage of time from the major conflicts could be seen as also helping to heal the raw memories those who lived through the war years harboured and so the generations to come don't have to overcome the same degree of sorrow in order to put together a family history of the past.
We have all heard of returned soldiers, or even their spouses, who refused to discuss their war-time experiences, preferring to let sleeping dogs lie. But the old adage "if you don't learn lessons from history it has a habit of repeating itself" is unfortunately true.
