From the very beginning of this project, I have been eager to find photographs of the sailors in HMS India and, more importantly, to be able to identify the men in the photographs. The twenty or so family members I made contact with whilst researching A Bare Chronicle of Existence were able to provide me with photographs of their ancestors but it has actually been more recently that I have made more inroads into this thread of research. The annotated photo, found in Arnold’s photo album in 2022, which he has annotated with some nicknames of the men featured, added to my list of photographs for faces but it has been in the past couple of weeks that I have been able to add to this list. I discovered that the Merchant Navy records of 1918 had the photographs of each man attached to their records and these are available online. I was able to find files, and therefore photographs, for twenty-nine men who served on
, were interned and then went back to sea as a part of the merchant navy. These official photographs come across as looking very much like mug shots with the often surly expressions and official numbers being clutched on boards between two hands, but they are definitely a look at the men themselves and I can put faces to more names. I now have over fifty visual representations of individual sailors now and hope to keep increasing on that number. I feel that by having photographs of these men then I am really honouring their memory and honouring the experience they went through during WW1. I will keep scouring genealogy sites, old newspaper archives and records to keep trying to find more photographs of these men.
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