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I never knew my paternal grandmother, Violet Rosa Towell, as she died a year before I was born. My mother often spoke of her, and I remember her telling me that my grandfather was her second husband. Violet had once shown my mother a picture of her first husband and told her that he had died in the war.

So now to find out more. I didn’t even have a name for Violet’s first husband - if I could locate a record of their marriage in the birth, marriage and death indexes at www.findmypast.com, that should provide a name. To narrow down the years I needed to search, it would help to know Violet’s age. Assuming the information from my mother was correct, I searched the death indexes for her in 1966, the year before my birth. I found the following record in the indexes, which told me that she was 72 when she died: (age at death is shown in the indexes dating from March quarter 1866 to March quarter 1969)

I could now calculate when Violet would have been of an age to marry, so I searched the marriage records for her from age 18 in 1912 until the end of the war in 1918. This revealed the following record indexed under the first quarter of 1918:

So now her first husband had a surname - Jeffries. I then looked up the corresponding marriage record under this surname for March quarter 1918 and found a John Jeffries marrying a Towell:

I then wanted to find out more about John - had he really died during the war? And where?

So I consulted the military records on www.findmypast.com. A name search for John Jeffries in the Soldiers died in the Great War database revealed two potential records in Middlesex. One had died in 1915, and I knew my John Jeffries was still alive in 1918. The other was killed in action in France on 19 July 1918, which did match up with the details I’d been given.

I downloaded the military scroll for this John Jeffries:

Further confirmation that this was the correct record was provided by the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Here he was described as the son of Jack and Emily Jeffries, of Tottenham, London and the husband of Violet Rosa Towell (formerly Jeffries), of 43, Thornhill Square, Barnsbury, London. He had died aged just 23, at most only 7 months after their marriage, a sergeant in the 2nd/3rd West Riding Field Ambulance Corps unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps. His grave is pictured, third from the left in the back row.

http://www.cwgc.org/search/certificate.aspx?casualty=611839

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