Just noticed this thread as I have not been visiting the new style club forum that much since the switch. Cruces' comment about finding "himself" in the records reminded be of a similar experience I had myself.
I've done a couple of tours round the Normandy battlefields as part of summer holidays in past years including visits to a large number of military cemeteries (not a particularly morbid habit in the context of the visit generally).
From the Teutonic heroism imbued by the dark atmosphere in the German cemetary at La Cambe, the grand scale of the immaculate American cemetery at St Laurent and the modest intimacy of the British cemetery at Bayeux (British war grave commisssion sites are typically modelled along the style of an English country garden) you get a very good sense of the lesson you should come away with.
I was strolling between the plots at Bayeux stopping occasionally to read the inscriptions at random (with over 4000 graves you would be hard pushed to read all of them in a single visit) and after a while your mind starts to haze over at the similarity of the names and dates and ages etched on the headstones of the men buried there (the British soldiers stones nearly always depict the emblem of the Regiment they served with, which is useful for for recognising the distribution of casualties once you have a knowledge of the various designs).
I got to the end of one row and as I was about to move on I stopped abruptly. Something had registered that I hadn't quite absorbed immediately. I worked my way back down the line checking each stone and about 5 or 6 back I found it:
Private
J. Wilkes
Warwickshire Regt
7th June 1944
age 26
My name, beneath the "Digglyda" username, is James Wilkes. My Birthday is the 7th June 1971 and my age at the time of the visit to the cemetery was 26. Furthermore, Warwickshire is the county that my Paternal side of the family come from. My own Father did basic Infantry training with the Warwicks before joining the Parachute Regiment for his National service (as a 20 year old lance-corporal, he had veterans of Arnhem under his command during his time serving in Egypt!).
The sense of shock is imaginable and certainly served as a very personal reminder of the reason for visiting in the first place. Upon returning home I did some researching into my namesakes grave but unfortunately the material available online was limited. I did discover that he was in actual fact a "John" and not a "James" like myself. I certainly made sure to place a stand of flowers on his grave on a subsequent return to Normandy.
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