Since our return to the UK from Hong Kong in 2001, shortly after my father’s death, I started to take an interest in family history research. I have since compiled a fairly extensive family tree of my and Sue’s families on ancestry.co.uk. This family tree is in the public domain and is available for access by other family researchers - a fact that has proved useful on several occasions when I have received helpful comments and corrections from other researchers.
In the course of helping my mother move into a residential home near Abingdon, a couple of years before her death in 2009, I came across an album of photographs compiled by my father covering the period of his service in India during World War II. In an effort to flesh out the details of my father's military service between 1940 and 1946, I initially approached Forces War Records and the Ministry of Defence in 2019.
After a lengthy delay occasioned by the intervention of the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on government office working practices during 2020 and 2021, the Ministry of Defence records office provided me with copies of the contents of my father’s Army service file. This confirmed that he enlisted initially in the Territorial Army in St Albans on 26th February 1940 and was demobbed as a Staff Sergeant, Royal Engineers on 24th February 1946.
So much I already knew, albeit the service records added some more detailed information about my father’s training at Aldershot and service in the UK prior to his posting to India in 1941. However the service records contained no details for the period of my father’s service in India.
I subsequently sought assistance from the commercial arm of ancestry.co.uk called “AncestryProGenealogists” and paid for some time of a military researcher to endeavour to find more information on the nature and locations of my father’s service postings in India. Unfortunately the researcher was unable to find any significant amount of information beyond what is evident from my father's photograph album.
I am therefore left with the commonly-felt regret that I did not ask my father and mother about this period in their lives when they were still available to be asked.