Postcard

I’d forgotten about this when I was bemoaning having too many pictures and not enough wall space yesterday. I rescued it from mum’s house when she sold it in 2020. She didn’t want to take it with her, so I assumed it was just a decorative piece she or dad had found. Then she told me that it was sent to her grandmother during WW1 and was from her mother’s brother - my great uncle.
Firstly, I was surprised to hear about this great uncle. Mum never talked about any of her family - I only found out that her father had many siblings a couple of weeks back at a family event! Secondly, given that it was a piece of family history, I couldn’t understand why she was so happy just to throw it away.
It seems that it was something she’d ended up with when her brother died (he’d been the one to get it framed) but had no real attachment to. In fact, my mother has no interest whatsoever in the past, and it is almost impossible to get her to tell me anything about her early life.
So it seems I had a great uncle Ernest, who served in France during WW1. At this moment in time, I have no idea if he survived and whether or not there were other siblings out there.
I have a feeling that my aunt (mum’s younger sister) has done some research into that side of the family, so I will make a point of asking her next time I see her.
It’s at times like this that I wish I’d paid more attention to all those “old” people I dismissed as “boring” during my childhood. Some of them would have been not much older than I am now, and would have lived through two world wars. Then again, they were also from the generation that just didn’t talk about that sort of thing.
The good news though is that I found a bit of wall which was just the right size for it and which didn’t upset the plans for all the other pictures.