Every now and then we get feedback on things that we do that raises a smile and puts a spring in the step. This latest contact is as succinct a reason as why we do what do, as anything we’ve received before. Please read through to the end, it proves the importance of maintaining and sharing historical archive…
“I’m the eldest grandchild of David Preston, who you have included in your collection (read his story here)
I wanted to thank you, sincerely, for the effort and work you have put into the museum and acts such as creating the reading of that letter. For myself, my siblings and cousins, to get a chance to reconnect with our grandfather in this way is incredibly special.
My grandfather wrote a huge amount. Every birthday card would be as packed with anecdotes and scribbled poems as well wishes. Sometimes there wouldn’t be space for his name. In the way I think happens with many things, his diaries became such a constant thing they almost became invisible. After he died, I know it was a huge undertaking for my father, my uncles and my aunt to sort out and catalogue. The child in me was concerned with the affable old man who taught me to play cribbage, not with the idea of him as a young man 60 years before.
He died when I was around the same age he was when he went to war. I spoke at his funeral, talking about a great man in his 80s and 90s, without any concept of him as anything else. I wished I had gotten to know him better as I became an age when I was just starting to discover who I was as an adult. Since then, I’ve simply got on with my life. There have been far too many things for me to focus on in my immediate future to spend too much time on reflection. I remember learning through the family grapevine a couple of years ago that many of his POW diaries were being donated. I had read bits and pieces of them in the years since his death but never a serious study. I can answer the question posed in your article. At least for me, no, I had never read that letter. It must have been lying in one of the piles that passed me by.
When I got an email earlier today from that same family grapevine with a link to your website I was touched to see his name and some of his history recorded. Many of the details I already knew but I was completely unaware of this letter. It’s been over a decade since my grandfather died and I thought I had fully processed my grief at his passing. I’m not afraid to say I’ve spent the past 2 hours bawling my eyes out having heard that letter read aloud.
When the video started it was disconcerting to hear my grandfather’s words in someone else’s voice but by the end I couldn’t hear any voice but his. I didn’t know I still remembered it.
This is a longer email than I was originally intending to send but I wanted to express my thanks to everyone at the GH museum, the member of the team who read the letter and whoever’s idea it was to have it recorded. You gave me my grandfather back for a couple of minutes today and an understanding of him and his experience that I would not have otherwise known.
Thank you again, my best wishes for your museum and all of you.”
If you are interested in our Research Services, and want to know more about your family history in the military, please have a look at our Research Service page.
David Preston