Bertram James Cornwallis West.

[Peter Goodey]

I know that Bertram J C West sent a photo on my grandfather when he was born to his father (John) from the Sgt Mess in Great Yarmouth I don’t know what Regiment he was in or whether he was in the military. Any help would be appreciated.

Does the photo show the father's uniform? Otherwise the birth certificate of the child, presumably the John William C WEST registered in Yarmouth in Sep qtr 1908, should show the father's occupation.

[Becksey]

No doesn’t show a uniform unfortunately but the photo is on a postcard and it says sgt mess on it with a Great Yarmouth post mark.

[Megan Roberts]

I have re-read all the posts to see if there’s anything that’s been missed, and I think the summary of what you are looking for is in two parts:

1. traditional family history
2. living paternal family relatives, as your father lost contact with them after his father died in 1938.

This site can help you with the first of those, but not with the second, because its terms of use do not permit us to give out details of living people. However, we can give you some pointers of where and how to look.

Traditional Family History

I can see from looking at your family tree that you have incorporated quite a bit of what we have already told you. I think that it would be worth your while to think about getting some BMD certificates because they can add so much to the story, rather than just producing a big tree with lots of lines and names on which can be a bit confusing when you print it out.

For Lilian Rebecca there is a death in 1921 in Lambeth which could be her. The age fits. I think that she and Walter Miller had 4 children:
Walter W 1913 Southwark, - this is presumably the Walter William Miller mentioned in the probate calender
Lilian Amy 1915 Southwark – baptised 12 May – St. Michael’s All Angels, Southwark
Alice M 1917 Lambeth
Henry T 1920 Lambeth

For all of them except Lilian, the birth index shows the mother’s maiden name as Wakefield – for Lilian it shows it as West, which was obviously a mistake.

You can search for the children of a marriage, certainly on Findmypast or FreeBMD and perhaps on other sites, using just the surname and the mother’s maiden name, which is quite useful when trying to identify children from a particular marriage.

Living Relatives

FreeBMD goes up to 1992 so that allows you to identify the name of the wife of your father’s cousin Bertram who died in 2010, and using the method I described above, the names of any children they had – I believe they had 2 sons.

Once you have identified potential living relatives you can either use social media to try and contact them, or perhaps you might want to make a more indirect approach through a people tracing service such as the one run by the Salvation Army.

[Becksey]

Oh that's perfect Megan!!

It was the traditional family I was looking for as I realise on most sites and forums they won't let you talk about living relatives...but knowing possible places to look is brill. Thanks so much for your help