I have always considered myself very much English. Yet a DNA test tells a more complicated story — English, yes, but also Irish, Scots, Danish, and French. I am, it turns out, a product of history. But then, aren’t we all?
Delving into my family history, I discovered that one of the things common English families have always done — whether willingly or otherwise — is furnish the wider world with their sons and daughters. In the late 1700s, two brothers from my bloodline fell foul of the law over the matter of a horse. The authorities called it theft. One brother was hanged for it. The other was transported to Australia, and from that single moment of misfortune, a family was scattered. I can trace ancestors to Virginia, USA, to Canada, to the far corners of what was once the British Empire — each of them carried by circumstance, poverty, or ambition to places their parents could never have imagined.
When you track the paths of these dispersed ancestors, you find something else: they fought. From Waterloo to Gallipoli and on to Normandy, generation after generation answered some call — a king’s, a country’s, an empire’s. But it is only when you stand before a headstone, reading a name you recognise from the margins of your family tree, that these legends stop being stories and become real.
Three Graves in Flanders
In 2018, I visited Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery in Belgium — one of the largest Commonwealth war cemeteries on the Western Front. I had done enough research to know that I had family buried there, but nothing quite prepares you for the reality of walking those rows.
I found three graves bearing three different surnames, yet all connected by blood to me. The first was Private Cawser of the North Staffordshire Regiment, killed aged just eighteen. Research confirmed he was a distant cousin. The second was Sergeant Sollis, who had earned the Military Medal before he was killed in 1917 — a fourth cousin. The third was Private Hicks, another distant cousin, another name on another stone.
Of the three, it was Sergeant Sollis whose story took the most unexpected turn. He was in his late thirties when he died — older than most, a man who had already built a life. He left behind a widow and a young son. Tracing the family forward, I discovered that his widow eventually remarried and emigrated, of all places, to Canada where I live now. His son went with her and, in time, took the surname of his stepfather: Rouse.
I searched for what became of the boy. Private Rouse of the Canadian Army was killed in the Dieppe Raid of 1942. The son of a man who fell in Flanders, raised under another man’s name in another country, lost in another war. Just another soul swallowed by the century.
The Man Who Was Never Talked About
For most of my life, I carried only the vaguest impression of my great-grandfather, Samuel Simpson. My grandmother had told me he was lost on the Somme. When I pressed her for more, she dismissed the subject entirely. She wasn’t interested. So I accepted the silence and assumed Samuel was simply one of the hundreds of thousands with no known grave, swallowed by that catastrophic battlefield.
The truth, when I eventually found it, was more human — and more heartbreaking.
Samuel enlisted in the Rifle Brigade in 1915. But rather than being sent to France, he was returned home to continue work in a munitions factory — his civilian skills deemed more valuable to the war effort than his rifle. During those two years, he met a local girl named Edith. They married. They had a daughter — my grandmother. They built a life: a home, stability, a future. For a moment, it must have felt as though the war would let them keep it.
In June 1918, Samuel was called back to the colours. He was sent to France and killed on the 27th of August 1918 — less than three months before the Armistice. He has no known grave.
I thought that was where the story ended. Then, through my volunteer work at the Saskatoon Museum of Military Artifacts, I met a husband and wife team who conduct tours of the Western Front battlefields. I mentioned Samuel to them, and they offered to have a researcher friend look into it.
What they uncovered changed everything. Samuel Simpson was not lost on the Somme. He was in fact killed on the Arras front, fighting alongside Australian troops in the advance of late August 1918. It was the Australians who recovered his body along with those of just over forty other men from his regiment, burying them together. In 1919, as part of the great cemetery concentration effort that followed the war, those graves were located. Only two of the men could be identified — a Lieutenant and a Lance Corporal. The rest, Samuel among them, were reinterred without names in a remote cemetery called Suzanne No. 3.
He is there. I know it now. I have never visited — the cemetery is so remote that the journey has not yet been possible — but I know the ground that holds him. That’s something at least.
The Weight of an Empty Space
I had an uncle killed in Normandy — Albert Cawser. My father was close to him, and through his stories Albert became real to me long before I ever stood at his grave. I know where he landed on D-Day, the ground he fought across, and where he fell. I have visited his headstone several times. There is grief in those visits, yes, but also a completeness. He is remembered. He is found.
With Samuel Simpson, there was always something different. After his death, his widow remarried. Every photograph was destroyed. Every trace of him was removed — his medals, his death plaque, the small physical evidence that a man had lived and loved and been loved in return. He was erased, not out of malice perhaps, but out of grief and the painful practicalities of a widow rebuilding her life.
That erasure has haunted me for most of my adult life. For years I couldn’t fully explain why the absence of Samuel affected me so deeply, more deeply than the deaths I could visit and mourn at a headstone. I think I understand it now.
When I served in the British Army, I had a fear I never spoke aloud: that if I were killed in some foreign field, I would too quickly be forgotten. Not mourned — but forgotten. That the world would carry on, and the fact of my having been in it would quietly disappear.
Samuel Simpson was forgotten. His widow could not carry the weight of remembering him and still survive. I do not blame her for it. But somewhere in that story is the thing that has always driven me to find him — because a man who died for his country, who left behind a wife and child and a house and a life, deserves to be more than an empty space where a photograph should be.
I have no photograph of Samuel Simpson. I may never stand at the ground where he lies. But his memory lives on — in me, in the research that gave him back a battle and a burial, in the circles of history that keep drawing us back to the men and women we came from. We are all, in the end, products of the stories we choose to carry forward.
Kevin Hicks BEM is a historian, storyteller, and content creator behind the History Squad YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/c/thehistorysquad
He is a former British soldier and police officer, a professional medieval bowman, and a volunteer at the Saskatoon Museum of Military Artifacts.
