Another first ...

As the title suggests, I hit another "first" this week, by discovering a Prisoner of War amongst my various & distant ancestors.

Blaydon Edward Pilbrow, for t'was he, was born in July 1899 to William & Laura (nee Blaydon) in the village of Hinderclay in Suffolk. He lived briefly in Ipswich, although he may well have been too young to notice (speculation, m'lud, no evidence!), and then the family returned to his birth place by 1911.

According to the Great War Service Records on Ancestry, Blaydon enlisted on 6 September 1917 at the age of 17yrs 359 days, then joined the British Expeditionary Force in France on 2 April 1918.  Three weeks later he was taken prisoner.

Blaydon died five months later, in the prison hospital in Metz.  I originally thought that Metz was in Germany but, having just looked it up, it seems to be in France - just south of Luxembourg and just north of Nancy.

So, the next thing to do is to look for information about POWs in the Great War .....

More soon