Vincent Bingham - RAAF WWII

I often tell the story of how surprising simple some of our searches are. Well this one is the complete opposite. It was so confusing I kept each webpage I had to accessed open so that I could continually cross check the next piece of information with the last. I currently have 26 tabs open and I estimate that it took me 30+ hours of research to get to a result.

The first part of the search was completely straight forward. It started with a message from Cath N, a friend of mine who is connected with the Yass RSL. During a recent house clean up, two WWII medals were found and handed to the sub-branch. It didn't take me long to work out the recipient was 55125 Vincent William Bingham who served in the RAAF. Vincent was married to Pearl and in 1941 they had a son, Grant. However, Vincent died in 1947 and Grant in 1961. All this information came from a website which documents headstones.

I then went down the path of trying to determine who Pearl was and that is when the difficulties stated. Her full name was Pearl Matilda nee Grant, this explained the name of their son. She pretty much disappeared from public records after Vincent died so I made an assumption that she remarried which proved correct, and then some. When I accessed the first picture above I hadn't noticed a further plaque within the main grave. A search on the headstone website came up with a result for Pearl.

By using a search combination for the names Pearl Matilda and Reuben on Ancestry.com I found that Pearl was married to Reuben Crymble but there was a large gap between when Pearl was in the electoral rolls using the surname Bingham and then Crymble, that is because her second marriage had been to Alexander Bradley. Reuben was husband number three. There were no children from either marriage so I stated all over again.

I found that Vincent had one sibling so I thought I would follow this family line. Then the difficulties multiplied. His sister was Joan Mary Bingham. Joan married Edward John Grant. At first I assumed that the same surname of Pearl and Edward was just a coincidence as I couldn't find confirmation of who their parents were. I had to go back into the archives to unravel all the family connections.

It turns out that everyone was connected. Brother and sister Vincent and Joan married brother and sister Edward and Pearl. The conformation came when I found the death notice for Pearl's father Primiron Frederick Grant.

Priomiron (sometimes mis-spelt Priomirom) was the son of Priomiron Frederick Grant. This was the cause of more confusion when searching the records. I think a lot of people who included these gentlemen in their Ancestry family trees assumed it was the same person. I was a little surprised that all the clues were now pointing at Canberra until I looked deeper at Edward John Grant.

Edward and Joan lived in Melbourne and had two sons. Peter Frederick Grant and Wayne Vincent Grant. The use of names from the previous generation is very strong in this family. Luckily the name combination is unusual and I found a Peter Frederick Grant in the electoral roll living in Perth in 1980. Without any additional evidence I made the assumption this was the same person. However, the leads ran dry. By just doing ransom searches on multiple websites, I found a death notice for Peter Frederick Grant in Perth in 2016. The noticed mentioned a son, Simon. This was really not a lot to go on so I waded trough social media and found multiple possibility but only one in Perth. I fired off a message earlier this afternoon and to my very pleasant surprise I received a response almost immediately. All the assumptions and guesses I made were correct and I had contacted Peter's son.

I've now connected Cath and Simon and the medals will soon be sent to Vincent's great nephew.

The returned medal tally is now 2698.    

 

WWII group to Leopold Face

This search started last week with a email from Bill A who told me that four WWII medals awarded to NX102015 Leopold Harivson Face had passed through several sets of hands before ending up with him. The medals were located in South Australia where Leopold, know as Blue, settled after the war. Bill had done some research via Ancestry and worked out the family tree for Blue. As with a lot of information on Ancestry, Bill got to a certain point in time but couldn't quite make the link to the current generation.

Blue did not marry or have children, however, was one of 12 children. Several of his siblings either died young or, like Blue, didn't marry. The best lead I found was one sister who married and settled in Albury, NSW. 

This was his sister, Syliva. Sylvia's married name was Martin and one of her daughters was Allayne who died in 2019. This enabled me to find a contemporary death notice for Allayne which provided the names of her husband and children. By using a combination of electoral roll entries, ABN records and the white pages I was able to provide Bill a phone number to contact Allayne's family. Bill will soon arrange for the medals to be returned to another niece of Blue's

The returned medal tally is now 2696.

Blue when he was a teenager. 

WWII group of 4 - Bill Woods

Even though it took less than two hours from the start of this research until I was able to identify a family member to contact, that short period of time belies some of the genealogy tricks I had to pull off to get a result.

The WWII group awarded to NX98941 William John Woods was hand delivered to my place yesterday by Iain R-E. Initially, I had difficulty working out who exactly Bill was as there were multiple people by this name in the electoral rolls and the year of birth on WWII nominal roll didn't line up with the NSW BDM records. There was also very little public information about Bill and the only additional information I could find from his war time service was this photo (copyright expired) on the AWM web site.

Description

Tarakan Island. 19 July 1945. Members of No 2 Gun Detachment, 53 Anti Aircraft Regiment (composite) going through their gun drill. Known to be in the photograph are: NX132493 Bombardier E. R. Vincent, NX106736 Gunner (Gnr) F. J. Maher, NX140393 Gnr Britton, NX172041 Gnr J. Cook, NX132498 Gnr P. J. Staines, NX146347 Gnr Kelly, NX98941 Gnr Woods, NX137392 Gnr Doolan, and NX144262 Gnr G. J. Muller.

The only other piece of information I found to be usable was his NOK was listed as Grace Woods. What I didn't know was if this was his mother, sister or wife. Through a process of elimination (read looking at the  I narrowed down a William Woods who was the son of Leslie Francis Woods and Grace Ross. 

This wasn't conclusive so I looked at the other children of Leslie and Grace to try to find confirmation. This came in the form of the death notice of Francis Leslie Woods which named all his siblings including 'Bill'. By cross checking all the names I became convinced I had the right William. I then found a death notice for Bill which also listed all the same siblings, his wife Daisy, daughter Joan, son in law Lance and the names of three grandchildren. Francis also served in WWII.

The rest was quite simple. I located two of Bill's grandchildren via social media and within a couple of hours of sending off a message I was talking to Graham. I'm told by Graham that he last saw the medals about 10 years ago but due to a set of circumstances didn't think he would see them again. I'll send Bill's medals back to his family in the very near future.

Thanks Iain for taking a detour from your trip to Canberra to safe hand deliver these medal.

The returned medal tally is now 2692.