So many gaps

Sometimes the stories in family history seem to be made up of a few standout events, punctuated by long silent gaps where you know absolutely nothing. And sometimes what might be in the gaps is the most fascinating part of the story. Joseph Charlton’s story is like that.
 
Joseph wasn’t part of my family but I knew of him through a family connection by marriage. I didn’t mean to spend today trying to uncover his story, but I found this record by chance, and then I just had to keep going.
 
The first standout event in Joseph’s life was that his parents divorced in 1912, when he was one year old. Since his mother was the ‘guilty’ party, his father gained custody, and there is no record of him seeing his mother during his childhood.
 
The next known event is when Joseph, aged 21, arrives in Southampton on board ship from Montreal. He seems to have been working in Canada as a farmer and he declared his intention of making his permanent home not in England, but in some other part of the British Empire.
 
We don’t know what happened to Joseph’s dreams of emigration, or when he joined the British Army. The next big event – a very big one – is that he was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore, on 15 February 1942, and spent the rest of the war in Japanese POW camps. The photo is of his Japanese POW record. It looks so small and delicate to record such horrific events. (I haven’t worked out why his date of capture seems to be wrong.)
 
Joseph was released on 2 September 1945. He married, and he and his wife lived what seems to have been an uneventful life, in the same part of London, for the next twenty years. He died on 1 June 1987. If there were any more standout events, we don’t know about them.