G.I.Bride

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Military

The Memorial Day topic is The Military, not a good one for me.  I was raised a Quaker, and for those not familiar with the Religious Society of Friends, (also known as Quakers) most of us are pacifists.  My commitment has always been to human society as a whole, more recently extended to include other members of creation and the earth itself, not to a single nation-state or ethnicity.  My ‘devotion to duty’ has always been channelled into working for peace and justice anywhere and everywhere, and my hero is my mother who laid the path for me.

So, what is a family historian to do in this case?  I know my maternal grandfather, Frances Cecil Harley, served in the First World War 1 (1914-1919).  His World War 1 Service Record reports that he was initially a 2nd Lieutenant, 6th Royal Fusiliers, but he later switched services and was first an Able Seaman, in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves and then a Sub-Lieutenant in the Naval Forces (Admiralty documents available online at National Archives).  This last designation he held on to, for many years later in the 1940s and 1950s, long after he had abandoned his English family, he was listed in the New Zealand Electoral Rolls as Cecil Francis Harley, a Retired naval officer, living at Pahia, Northland.

And I have some photos of his son, my uncles John and Tony, ready for duty in World War 2.  I especially like this one of them with their grandmother, and my maternal great grandmother, Emma Kent Gilvray.  

John and Tony Harley, with their grandmother Emma Gilvray Harley, in 1940.

Further back in history, my paternal great great grandfather’s oldest brother, Duncan MacNie, left home to become a soldier at the age of sixteen.  He joined the Royal Horse Artillery in 1828, (records list him as 18 but he was probably only 16) serving until 1849, when he was pensioned out with the rank of sergeant. In 1841 he was in the Royal Ordnance Hospital and Quarters, in Woolwich.  He and his wife Helen Mills had five children, one of whom, Charlotte, was born in Prussia about 1848-9.  By 1861 Duncan had retired from the military; he was listed in the census that year and in 1871 as a “Chelsea Pensioner.”    He died in 1874 in St. Ninians, not far from his birthplace at Gartur, Cambusbarron in the same parish.

But before leaving Memorial Day remembrances I have to acknowledge that I became a mother on Memorial Day, while with my husband who was serving with the Fourth Armored Division in southern Germany.  Yes this pacifist, to her surprise, found herself unexpectedly a GI bride!