1939

With a house that is now far too quiet and a morning spent cleaning, tidying, washing, sorting beds etc. etc. I found a couple of hours this afternoon to do a bit of delving into the past.
 
The 1939 Register for England and Wales was created, as war broke out, for the purposes of conscription, for the effective marshalling of resources on the Home Front and for the issuing of identity cards. The Register was released by the 'Findmypast' website a while back, but the cost of accessing the records was high, for the amount of useful information one might obtain. And then the good news - from yesterday there is free access to the Register for anyone with a 'Findmypast' subscription. By chance, after a lapse of several years because I was doing very little research, I recently took up a very good discounted offer and was delighted when it was announced that the 1939 Register was now part of the subscription.
 
I started looking up my grandparents and have found out a few interesting things, e.g. exactly where they living in 1939. Here is the entry for my grandfather, whom I knew very well. He was always very keen on cars and I was told he learned to drive whilst serving in a Transport Regiment in the First World War. He had a car when very few people had them and always had a 'posh' car. The photo here is him and his new car - (I don't know what date that was). I now know that in 1939 he was a 'Private Motor Car Driver'. Quite what that meant I don't know, but it certainly fits and I did not know that. I did know that he served during the Second World War with a Fire Service and this is recorded in the Register. I think the photo, a print from the local newspaper, shows him on the left, not exactly fighting fires!!
 

(The 'closed' entries are people born less than a 100 years ago - so my father is one of them.)