Family history
Jan. 10th, 2006 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trixtahThe Auckland Museum - formerly known as the Auckland War Memorial Museum - has the best Maori and Pacific collection I've seen (unsurprisingly), and it is also a huge repository of stuff related to all the wars New Zealand has fought in. It's not on the scale of the Imperial War Museum, but it's pretty awe-inspiring. It was the first place I learned about the sickeningness of war.
Most of the war collection is on the top floor, which is huge. There is a marble lined room with the names of the people killed during various conflicts, with two members of my family listed, one for the First World War, the other in the Second. It seems that recently the museum has collated a database on war casulties, based on the Commonweath War Graves Commission DB, it appears.
But the nice thing is that the museum database is being expanded with data from relatives. It's a fantastic idea, gathering up the stories that are oral history to individual families, and making them a resource for all to share. I looked up my family members, and sure enough, it seems that my uncle has provided a good deal of information about my great-uncle Arthur, who was killed in WWII. More family history has been appended to the bare facts of date killed and service number. There are pictures.
I never met the man (obviously), but those photos and information made me cry. My grandfather (who is shown in the pics) was extremely close to him, and was shattered by his death. The image of him putting the floral tribute from my great-grandmother on the grave epitomises to me the waste of the war. As a result of my great-uncle's death, and the horrific PoW conditions my grandfather later endured in Italy and Germany, he became a bitter, closed, arrogant man, who had very little time for his family, who treated my Irish grandmother abominally, and who spent as much time as possible on overseas postings (he was a career officer all his life - but he could have taken shorter o/s tours, if any, due to his being a family man).
I see the grave in the picture - the waste of one life. My grandfather's image represents the blighting of other lives - his and my family's - due to the emotional fallout of the war. We, my family, still deal with the crap that is his legacy today, although our relationships have vastly improved over the last 20 years. So, one can think of the deaths, but it is not only the deaths that are the consequences of war.
Most of the war collection is on the top floor, which is huge. There is a marble lined room with the names of the people killed during various conflicts, with two members of my family listed, one for the First World War, the other in the Second. It seems that recently the museum has collated a database on war casulties, based on the Commonweath War Graves Commission DB, it appears.
But the nice thing is that the museum database is being expanded with data from relatives. It's a fantastic idea, gathering up the stories that are oral history to individual families, and making them a resource for all to share. I looked up my family members, and sure enough, it seems that my uncle has provided a good deal of information about my great-uncle Arthur, who was killed in WWII. More family history has been appended to the bare facts of date killed and service number. There are pictures.
I never met the man (obviously), but those photos and information made me cry. My grandfather (who is shown in the pics) was extremely close to him, and was shattered by his death. The image of him putting the floral tribute from my great-grandmother on the grave epitomises to me the waste of the war. As a result of my great-uncle's death, and the horrific PoW conditions my grandfather later endured in Italy and Germany, he became a bitter, closed, arrogant man, who had very little time for his family, who treated my Irish grandmother abominally, and who spent as much time as possible on overseas postings (he was a career officer all his life - but he could have taken shorter o/s tours, if any, due to his being a family man).
I see the grave in the picture - the waste of one life. My grandfather's image represents the blighting of other lives - his and my family's - due to the emotional fallout of the war. We, my family, still deal with the crap that is his legacy today, although our relationships have vastly improved over the last 20 years. So, one can think of the deaths, but it is not only the deaths that are the consequences of war.
