Had my own 'Meet the Ancestors' Moment Earlier in the Week.

It all started when I was chatting with friends about the upcoming centennials for various World War 1 campaigns and I mentioned that I believed a family member died at Gallipoli. One of my friends expressed great surprise as they had believed that only Australians and New Zealanders had died there. I decided to find out a little more and a little judicious internet surfing rapidly made it clear that the Gallipoli Campaign had been pretty bloody killing over a hundred thousand soldiers and wounding many more before it ground to a halt. Of those deaths the majority were British.

With that knowledge I asked my mother about it, it turned out that my among my father's nicknames were 'The War Memorial' or 'Granite with Knobs On' as he had been named for his uncle who had died at Gallipoli. My mother further added that this was in part an act of atonement as my paternal grandfather had been his commander at the time.

I then dug a little deeper and the first thing I found was this article about a remembrance last year (2013) for the campaign which quoted the gravestone of a Lieutenant Commander J.R.Boothby (my father was J.R.M.Boothby). The quote just felt right:

With undaunted heart he breasted life's last hill.

Apparently the families were given just 64 characters and I was really glad that, if this was my great-uncle, my family had done so well.

As I dug further I discovered that Lt. Cdr. J.R.Boothby had died early in May 1915 as part of the RNAS Armoured Car Squadron. I dug further and discovered that the RNAS was in fact the Royal Naval Air Service a forerunner of both the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF. What I hadn't realised was that the RNAS had the only mechanized land forces in the British forces at the start of the war. In fact it formed the nucleus of the unit that created the first tank.

With that I managed to understand how my grandfather fitted in when I discovered this book called the Devil's Chariots and on perusal of the limited pages made available by Google I was able to determine that my grandfather had been in command of the RNAS Armoured Car Division at the time of Gallipoli so it all tied up.

I'm still researching the topic but as a result I'm going to see what I can do for the centenary of my great-uncle's death to remember him and his sacrifice.