Thinking about the ancestors...

[Mael Coluim]

Awesome story! Thanks for sharing it. Although, most of us don't know the details of our forebearers' lives, I am sure most on this forum lineage would echo similar stories.

[Pleater]

There was a diphtheria epidemic just at the end of the Great War.

My mother's mother, who had lost her first husband at the Somme, remarried to a soldier in the same regiment and had two children by the first man and one by the second when the epidemic struck.

The two younger children died, the oldest, a girl, survived.

I believe it was at Ypres (Wipers) that my grandfather was shot in the arm and then gassed, and was in hospital at the time.

At that time, in England at least, it was usual for very small children and babies to be placed in the coffin of any married woman who was due to be buried. If no funeral was to take place within a suitable time then children who had been baptised were buried in a corner of the cemetery. Babies who were still-born were not supposed to be buried in the cemetery, though they were put in coffins unofficially in an arrangement between the midwives and undertakers. My father's mothers family were midwives.

My father revealed only shortly before his death that a still-born baby, his brother, had been put into the top drawer of a chest of drawers and remained there for several days before he was collected for burial.

Although there are many unmarked graves they are not entirely unknown - for instance I know where in the cemetery my grandmother's babies are buried and it has remained undisturbed for many decades, because other people know too.