Who Are These Guys?

July 15, 2011

I haven't post for sometime for I've developing a website, link is above, and trying to finish the book I've working on for three years. In the past I've posted some excerpts from my grandfather's WW One journal. I have a few followers to my blog, which I'll continue, but more are interested in my site. I've been promoting my site through the many forums I've joined trying to find information on three British soldiers that died 97 years ago, and one of them had a nickname instead of the standard issue first name. If you're curious, his nickname is Pugie, which for some reason makes me think that he might have been a tad over weight. Let me begin at the beginning.

Almost 4 years ago I was given a box of documents that had belonged to my grandparents. Among the documents was my grandfather's WW One journal; a treasure to be sure. Although the journal was in excellent condition, it was difficult to read. Why may you ask? Because the inside pages looked like the multiple-square paper used in graphing, and the squares were only 1/4 inch. Second problem was my grandfather used a pencil, which makes sense when you're in the army, and he wrote in cursive. I got very frustrated trying to read his entries so I decided to scan each of the pages so I could enlarge the image and with that I would be able to read his writing. This helped, but I had to call on my wife's experience as an elementary teacher to decipher some of the words.

taken in 1909, my grandfather is the soldier kneeling

From my original posts you can tell that the entries were very compelling and by the time I finished transcribing the entries into a word document, I thought that I should share this with the world. However, it is difficult to get the world's attention! When I looked over what I transcribed, I realized that unless the reader had a working knowledge of WW One battles, they wouldn't be able to connect the journal entries with the battle they represented. I knew this for a fact, because I didn't know very much about the war or the battles. So I set out to read and research the war so I could write a brief description of the battle prior to the journal entries. Much Better! Problem number two, was the profuse use of the names of French cities. Should I leave them in or take them out? They were important because they were a road map of where the army traveled, so I had to come up with maps. To put this in proper perspective, up to this point I've dedicated over a year to this project and I haven't reached the difficult elements of the story, which I'll go into in my next post....which I promise will be within a few days.