Sadly missed

My great-uncle Frederick Edward Jones (circled)


National Missing Persons week commences in Australia this Sunday. This year the focus is on young people as a significant group at risk of going missing. Of the estimated 35,000 people who are reported missing each year, approximately 20,000 are under the age of 18.

Having a member of the family go missing is devastating. My maternal grandmother’s brother disappeared around the time of World War 1 and the family never heard from him again. My grandmother spent years trying to discover where he was. She thought he had gone to Australia but though she tried the usual missing persons channels, her beloved brother Tim had simply vanished.

Decades later she would still talk sadly about his disappearance. It made a deep impression on me.

When I took up genealogy in the 1990s, I tried using various resources available in New Zealand to locate any trace of him. There appeared to be no record of his death there. I was unable to pick up a trail anywhere.

Last year I decided to start looking again and this time in Australia. Again, I could find no Timothy Jones who might be my great uncle. Jones has to be one of the most frustrating names to research!

One afternoon I was idly going through the World War 1 records of the First Australian Imperial Force on the National Archives of Australia website, tracing other family members. Suddenly I thought - did my grandmother’s brother join the Australian army? Other Kiwis did, including my paternal grandmother’s brother and uncle.

The query page requested just a surname. Unsurprisingly, Jones turned up more than 2300 results. However, instead of refining the search by putting in a given name, I decided to look through the lot, listing 200 on a page at a time. I noticed the records included POB - place of birth - so I searched for ‘Waitara’, a small town near New Plymouth, on each page. Gratification was swift. Just four pages later, I found a Frederick Edward Jones, born in Waitara, NZ, next-of-kin father William Jones. A score on both points.


Could Frederick Jones be Tim Jones? I downloaded his war record. Frederick (or Fred as he apparently called himself) had been a groom. My mother told me he had worked with horses. The next-of-kin details tallied. His father William Jones was listed as working at the Waitara freezing works, where indeed my great grandfather worked. I searched in the World War 1 census taken in New Zealand and discovered Frederick listed as a jockey working at Riccarton Racecourse in Christchurch, and a member of the Second Reserves.

When I looked in my family tree at a list of my grandmother’s siblings, I suddenly realised that of seven children only the oldest two, Mary and Annie were known by their given names. William John was called Jack, Jerome Thomas was Paddy, Ethel Frances was known as Tup and my grandmother, Aileen Cletus was Molly. Not surprising that Frederick was commonly called Tim after one his mother’s brothers.

I flipped through the pages of my great uncle’s war record. He’d started with the 5th Light Horse Regiment then was later transferred to the 2nd Light Horse Field Ambulance. He was eventually discharged in Brisbane (where he’d enlisted) in 1919. It seems he stayed in Australia as his papers show that at least three times in the ensuing years he’d lost his discharge papers - in 1928, 1934 and 1940 - and had applied for replacements. In 1928, it seems, he had inadvertently burned them with rubbish when cleaning up camp after a job. The next time another fire had destroyed his papers. On July 2, 1940 they were in luggage that went missing when he was travelling by train in NSW. I doubt he knew, as he took that trip, that his father had died two days earlier.

I continued patiently sifting through the resources in the archives and was handsomely rewarded when I discovered a photo of Private Jones and his Field Ambulance comrades. I purchased the hi-resolution file and as I zoomed in on my new-found great uncle I could see his brothers and sisters looking back at me. I had a pang of disappointment that my grandmother was not still alive to share my find. The photo was an absolute bonus and my mother was so pleased at least part of the mystery had been solved.

I still need to pick up Fred Jones’s trail after 1940. He certainly won’t still be alive today, but I am curious to know what happened to him. A Frederick Edward Jones is interred in a cemetery in Queensland. Is that him? Did he marry? Have children? Ninety plus years on, someone is still looking for him.

Pat Churchill
Melbourne
pat (dot) churchill (at) cookingdownunder (dot) com


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