True Identity of a fallen soldier in the Great War Part 3

[cnosni]

Another search of the Ancestry online Military database did produce one more result for Private 3/10645,this time on their UK, Soldiers Died in the Great War, 1914-1919 records database.This publication was a series of books, broken down into battalions, that listed those who had died in the war.Though only an index return on Ancestry it did show that Private 3/10645 R Hoonan was in the 2nd Battalion of the West Riding Regimnet, the same battalion that James Hoolan's Army Service record showed his brother Robert Hoolan was in in August 1915.A visit to the British Library, which holds a microfilm copy of the original HMSO publication “Soldiers Died in the Great War 1914-1919”, upon which the Ancestry database is sourced revealed more details. The microfilm copy confirmed that Private 3/10645's forename was indeed Robert but it now showed that he was born (b) in Leeds and he enlisted (e) in Leeds.So we had a soldier killed in the First World War who not only had the same forename and similar sounding surname but was also in the same regiment as my great uncle and was born in the same place.

[cnosni]

This still did not answer the question as to why my great uncle was missing from the military records.Yet the personal similarities shared with Private 3/10645 Robert Hoonan were seeming to be more than just coincidences.I began to suspect that perhaps Robert Hoonan could be Robert Hoolan and that perhaps a mistake had been made with his surname.Now that i knew the battalion that Private 3/10645 was in i wrote to the regimental archivist of the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, a Mr Ford, based at the regimental museum in Halifax.I explained my theory and asked him to see if they had anything on Private 3/10645 in the regimental archives and to see if any records were consistant with the surname as being Hoonan.Mr Ford wrote back to me iand was able to confirm that any reference to Private 3/10645 they had showed that the surname of the soldier was "Hoonan".He was able to tell me a few things about Private 3/10645 and his life in the battalion where he appeared in the records, also supplying me with various extrcats from the battalion war diary for where this soldier would have been involved.The most relevant fact Mr Ford provided , though hardly the most outstanding, was fact that Private 3/10645 Robert Hoonan had embarked for France as a member of a draft of reinforcements for the 2nd Dukes that sailed for France in April 1915As i knew Private 3/1064 died in July 1916 then this embarkation date of April 1915 showed that Private 3/10645 must have been alive and in the 2nd Battalion Duke of Wellingtons in August 1915 at the time of James Hoolan's Army Service record showed that his brother Robert Hoolan was in the 2nd Dukes.Yet another coincidence, two men that shared all the above similar personal circumstances but were now able to be shown to have been in the same battalion at the very same time.However it could well be that there were such two men and that it wasnt merely coincidence but fact that there were these two men of whom we only had military records for one.So with that i thought i would look at Robert Hoonan to see what i could find out about him before the war.If i could find a history of him in the civilian records such as birth ,marriage registration or census then that would rule out any possibility that the two men could be one and the same person.Firstly i checked the General Register Office Inices for a birth of a Robert Hoonan, or similar sounding name, that was born in Leeds at the optimum period of time for him to have been in the army and to have died in July 1916.Having considered that some men lied about their age to be in the army, some being both too young or too old to have joined, i started my search from the extremes of 1861 to 1905.

[tyke bhoy]

bump Hoolan Hoolahan