19 February 2015

Raymond Spencer Veitch

This search has several twists which I've not encountered before. Let's see if I can explain it easily.
In January I was contacted by Ted from WA about three WW2 medals awarded to N99670 Raymond Spencer Veitch. With the group was a commemorative medallion for the attacks on Darwin in 1942. The first twist was that Ray's grand daughter, Nicole Wright, has posted a 'looking for' add on the NSW RSL website about these medals and how they were lost. Unfortunately, when Ted tried the phone number and email address that Nicole posted they were both inactive. That is when he contacted me.
When the medals arrived I noticed that they were marked with a (D) to indicate that they are an official duplicate set.
All my efforts to find Nicole were unsuccessful so I looked at Ray's siblings in the hope that they would know her. My search led me to Marissa who is Ray's great niece. The next twist is that Marrissa is also a serving solider. As it turned out, today I happened to be visiting another base near where Marissa is posted to. This afternoon I took a slight detour and delivered Ray's medals. The medals are back with the family and Marissa's uncle will do some more research looking for Nicole. I'm also hopeful that one day Nicole will search for Ray's name and come across this post. Then I can connect two branches of this family.
The last twist is that these medals were returned on the 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Darwin.
Thanks to Ted. The returned medal tally is now 1620.  

1 comment:

  1. Interesting story. There were Veitch's in Geraldton when I was a much younger lass.

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