What happens when you shake your family tree...

[reynardo]

lederhosen is in Canberra for work stuff, and da_norvegicus went to Canberra for the Impressionist exhibition, and so I joined them and my mum and dad and lederhosen's dad and stepmum and quatranoctal and we had a yummy dinner for my beloved's birthday.

Today, mum and da_norvegicus and I went to the National Archives to see the Bruce exhibit and some of their other work. Mum disappeared into the Reading Room for 10 minutes, and then came out laughing her head off. And herein we discovered some family scandal.

You see, my grandmother¹'s father divorced my grandmother's mother when my grandmother was quite young (about 10, I believe). Granny Caldwell took my grandmother and my great-aunt off to NSW, and he stayed in Melbourne and proceeded to court and marry another lass. Now my grandmother was born in 1911, when my great-grandfather was quite young (it had been, apparently, a rather rushed wedding and a very healthy baby for one born after only 6 months of matrimony). However, in 1940, my grandfather enlisted in WWII.

My mother has always wondered how he managed that, as he must have been almost 50 by then...

And so she checked the records...

He'd dropped his age by 14 years, and pretended to be 35.

HAH!

They obviously found out something, because his enlistment is shown to last ONLY 8 days. He's then been re-enlisted, with a number that means he couldnt' be sent overseas, drafted into the Ciphers Section, and stayed there for the next 10 years. And on this record, his date of birth has him at 45.

For a while we wondered if this meant he'd actually fathered my grandmother at 16, but consensus now seems to be that was a fiddle to keep him in the army. If he'd actually been known to be 50, he might have been thrown out.


But my mother was giggling maniacally all the way back to the car, muttering "The bloody sly bastard" and words to that effect.

It's all rather dubious. There will be more investigation :-)

1. Yes, that Evil Grandmother.

Comments

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

Encryption was a big thing in WWII. The fact that we could break Germany's Enigma machine and Japan couldn't break the allies' Navajo code gave us a big advantage in the battles.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Oh I know! It looks like he was working on the Japanese Ciphers, which is amazing! And explains where some of the mathematical background in the family comes from.