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  • Question about evacuees during WW2

    Hi

    We've just got the school records from someone who was sent to live with their grandparents in the country when he was a few months old in 1939 and started school there. It's on the evacuees class attendance register for the school. He started there in September 1944 and left in July 1945.

    The question I have is, whereas the other evacuee children are recorded as "left" when they leave, he is recorded as "transferred."

    It is a little Welsh school and on other earlier records I've seen from the same school - from the 1920's when doing other family research - "transferred" means transferring to another local school in the area. Often a C of E school. Would it mean the same in connection with evacuees?

    Also, is it possible to get WW2 registration details for someone born in 1940 if you know their date and place of birth, parents etc? I know you can get copies of people's details - date of birth, address and so on - from the Sept 1939 register that was compiled then and since rationing continued for some years after the war, I wondered if the details of children born during the war could be applied for as well?

    Sorry for my awful ignorance. I'm still very new at all this.

    Thanks!
    Last edited by Felix; 02-08-13, 03:46.

  • #2
    Have you asked the people who provided the school records?
    Always looking for Goodwins in Berkshire.

    Comment


    • #3
      Evacuees Records are not recorded in one database, so I am unsure what you might mean by "obtaining WW2 Registration details for someone born in 1940". The 1939 registration, available at a cost of £40 will tell you where people are living for that one month when it was written, but people displaced by the blitzes of 1940/1942, as they were in the big cities of London/Birmingham/Plymouth etc the addresses for 1939 may not be the same address by 1940. It certainly was NOT the same address for me and about 4 million other children. Some returned to same addresses but many did not. You can obviously apply for a birth certificate of any child born 1939 to 1945 and that will give you an address, but remember they may not have stayed at that address, my sister was born 1944 in a totally different place to where we lived subsequently.

      Everybody evacuated during W War 2 had a different experience. I can give you some idea from my own experience which might serve to qualify what you have found written in the school record in Wales.

      I was evacuated to foster parents in Bodmin from Plymouth in spring/summer of 1941 and went to school at the age of just 5 at the local primary school. In 1944 I was then sent by my parents to Teignmouth but this was a parental decision. I have since obtained the schools admission register to show that I was admitted to the local school in Bodmin September 1941, but no name and address for where I was living with foster parents was entered in the schools admission registers. My two brothers had been admitted to the school as boarding within the institution, which was an orphanage, January 1941, and my mother's name, but NO address, was given as their guardian.

      In March 1942 they were discharged from the school register as having left the school for Buckfast, with a question mark as they were old enough to have been transferred to Secondary School. The records asked for in the late 1990's were very unclear after the passage of time! In my own case my record stated that I left the school March 1944 for the local Council School.(then known as the Board School) This record was only partially correct in that I had actually gone to a boarding school in Teignmouth hence the Board school was correct!!

      All schools had their own way of writing up the records of their pupils, whether or not these pupils were local children or evacuees. Where it says "left" that could mean left school, as 14 was leaving age at this time, so many near 14 year may have skipped school the last few months. It also might have meant they left that school for another local school or retuned to their families, wherever that might have been. "Transferred" might mean transfered to a secondary school or a grammar school or again returned home to wherever.

      Remember there was a war on and schools were swelled with evacuees who did not always stay around long and parents did not always tell the schools that they had taken them back home! It was chaotic!!

      If your ancestor started school in 1944, living in the country with grandparents, and left in 1945 and the end of the war then being "transferred" sounds more as though at the age of 6 that he was going back home?

      Janet
      Last edited by Janet; 02-08-13, 10:56.

      Comment


      • #4
        A UK friend visited the archives and got them for me. But yes, we will have to do some more investigating and look around the local area for a possible answer. Another visit to the archives I think too.

        Thanks. :o

        Comment


        • #5
          Thanks so much for sharing your story. It helps greatly. I can understand the chaos at the time. Every little bit that I'm told helps to paint a more vivid picture.

          I was wondering, but saying really clumsily, if there were any records associated with children born during the war - perhaps associated with having a ration card. I've got a copy of some of the family's 1939 registration details and that's already been so useful.

          My UK friend who visited the archives for me photocopied the school records that were relevant. They're really interesting. All the other children of 6 or 7 are termed "left" It's just the one boy I'm looking at who's termed "transferred" but you could be quite right and whoever did the entries on that day might have just used different teminology. The fascination of family research!

          Thanks again. :o

          Comment


          • #6
            National Health Service Central Register (NHSCR)


            1939 National Identity Register and How to Order an Official Extract

            At the outbreak of war in 1939 a register was compiled by the Registrar General of everybody living in the UK for the purpose of issuing identity cards, ration books and call-up papers. The website below should help to clarify.

            http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/natio...-register.html

            The History of the Register

            On 29 September 1939, the Government carried out an enumeration of the population. The Second World War had started three and a half weeks earlier and the enumeration was a vital early step towards putting the nation on a war footing, providing the necessary information for:

            • issuing national identity cards,
            • issuing food and clothing ration books,
            • identifying children eligible for evacuation from areas vulnerable to bombing
            • identifying adults eligible for call up into the Armed Forces.

            Because of responsibility for the Census, every person was given their own unique civil registration number, based on where they were living on enumeration night. For people born after 29 September 1939, the number allocated when their birth was registered was used. On the formation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, there was no central index of patients registered with a general medical practitioner (GP). This resulted in the rapid inflation of GP's lists as people moving about the country appeared on more than one list. The NHSCR was set up as an index to control this inflation in the early 1950s. It has acted ever since as an index to NHS patients. In 2004, it was asked to provide to the equivalent index of customers of Scottish local authorities, its unique reference number (the 'NHS number') for people who had asked to be added to the local authority database – to ensure that the local authority database accurately identifies the right person. That additional task was tested during 2006 and completed in 2007.

            The list was added to as those born after 1939 were also given identity cards and numbers. I can still remember my own Identity Card Number, which after the war and the advent of the NHS became my NHS number, now changed again, sometime around 2004.

            One other interesting point I notice here is that the list was done to include:

            "identifying children eligible for evacuation from areas vulnerable to bombing"

            However, the criteria for areas of vulnerable bombing changed after the blitzes of certain cities like Plymouth, Liverpooll/Bristol/some Welsh Cities. In 1938 the above cities were counted as vulnerable but by 1939 just prior to the outbreak of war the MOD changed its mind and re-classified all these as "Neutral Areas," the thinking behind this was that these Western Cities were too far to the West to be reached by German bombers, so these cities and possibly others similarly classified such as those in Wales, are probably not on the 1939 register. There were NO evacuation plans for Plymouth until May 1941, AFTER the blitz had decimated Plymouth and many of the schools!! The whole evacuation of Plymouth children was then carried out in such a hurry that few records exist for that city. It is not easy obtaining information on evacuees from anywhere, though a lot of work has ben done by the ERA (Evacuee Reunion Association)

            Second World War evacuation, operation pied piper, non profit making registered charity, The Evacuee, reunion, lost touch, membership, send them to safety, evacuate children during the war


            You are doing all the right things by looking at the schools admission registers and the records that might be available at the local library or CRO. Good luck with your quest.

            For the record, I still have many unanswered queries as to my own evacuation. I do not know the names of my three foster parents, though I think I have some answers! Where people were very young it has been more difficult, and I did not think to check it all out before my parents died!!

            Janet
            Last edited by Janet; 02-08-13, 13:08.

            Comment


            • #7
              The school record keeping appears to have varied from place to place.
              At the town primary school where I worked, the school logbook recorded in detail the arrangements made for school sharing with a large group of children evacuated from a school in another town regarded to be an "at risk " area. The admissions register and log book for the host school both continued as usual, with NO further references to the evacuated children, once the school sharing had been set in place. As all the evacuees were from the same visiting school, and with their own separate teachers, I would think that they also completed their own log book to record events of significance. I can't remember how long they stayed - certainly not for the full duration of the war - but on them leaving, the host school resumed its normal full day programme, rather than alternating morning/afternoon sessions with the visiting school.

              In the village where I live now, children from the dockland area of Sunderland were evacuated in the early part of the war. The admissions register of the village school has not been deposited at the record office but I've perused the school log book and there is very little mention of "evacuees." Most of them didn't stay very long - they were frightened by all the open space, the farm animals, the lack of "town" facilities and the complete change of culture! There weren't many of them anyway - most homes (small two up two down cottages) were already "full" with their own children and other residents soon had members of their own extended family moving in or made private arrangements to billet bombed out, childless adults.

              Jay
              Janet in Yorkshire



              Genealogists never die - they just swap places in the family tree

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              • #8
                This is excellent info.

                Thanks so much.

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                • #9
                  More fantastic info.

                  Cheers!

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Felix

                    I can't add to the excellent posts of Janet and Janet in yorkshire above, but I think the over riding impression for modern day values and standards is how shockingly casual evacuation arrangements were.

                    Although evacuation was well executed from a logiistics point of view, once the children had been deposited, there ended the interests of authority. Absolutely not the slightest check was ever made on the "suitability" of those coming forward to offer billets for evacuated children and some terrible things happened to evacuees.

                    My (now elderly) friend and her sister were evacuated to Wales. Friend went to a very nice family, with whom she remained in close touch for the rest of her life - she called the lady "My Other Mother". Her sister, a few doors down, did not fare at all well and was eventually taken to hospital with a burst appendix and she was found to be so thin that even the wartime shortages did not account for it. Nevertheless, she was returned to the offending foster parents and eventually ran away. Her experiences affected her for the rest of her life.

                    Can you imagine in this day and age, putting a child onto a train to go you know not where, to live with absolutely anyone who volunteered to take them. It just seems incredible that this ever happened.

                    OC

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Yes, you're absolutely right. It does seem horribly casual to our modern eyes.

                      In the same way, I recently read an account of the Fairbridge Farm Schools in Oz and how disgracefully they were run. Children taken from their homes in the UK, sent to the other side of the world and treated like unpaid slave workers. Ill-educated and ill-fed.

                      It certainly does appear incredible now and the Farm Schools continued on to the 60's and 70's.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        One other point you may also like to know is that so many houses were destroyed in many of our cities and a desperate housing shortage was everywhere in 1945. Building supplies were in very short supply and most peope employed in the building trade had been conscripted into all the armed services, leaving a shortage of skilled labour as well as building materials in 1945.(Does this sound familiar for today??)

                        I cannot speak for other cities but in Plymouth, which City Centre had been totally destroyed in the Blitz, the main priority was to get the wheels of government back on the track and some shops rebuilt and schools made habitable before a start was made on building 30,000 homes for the people made homeless by the Blitz on Plymouth. I had to live with foster parents for a further two years from 1945 to 1947, the bomb sites my playground, before homes were built to house all those displaced. This meant that my mother was living in Cornwall with my sister, my father was living and working in another part of the City of Plymouth and my two brothers were at a school in Hampshire. We were not a priority as technically we all had homes! This happened in many cities, and so many of us were evacuated for much longer than the duration of the war.

                        Then there was the problem of eventually coming together as a family. Believe me, that was hard, and many families never gelled back into family life after long separations. There are many books written about it, and worth a study if you have family who were separated in this way.

                        Janet
                        Last edited by Janet; 02-08-13, 17:19.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Thanks for sharing this Janet. It certainly backs up what I think may have happened.

                          1945, the parents marriage seems to have broken down. They're living separately in London in what seem to be tiny flats, shared by several others. It would have made complete sense for children to stay in the country where there was more room and healthier conditions. As you say, evacuted for much longer than the duration of the war.

                          I've sent for some more school records to see when exactly the boy came to London to the children's mum. But I'm beginning to suspect it was not until 1947-48 when she moved in with her second partner who subsequently died in 1957. He had a decent-sized flat and even then in 1948, they were sharing it with another couple according to the electoral roll. A couple with children.

                          Your remark about families not gelling really strikes a chord. The little girl may have been brought up elsewhere for a host of practical reasons. Not least of which would been because she loved the family she lived with during the war and was happy there, whereas she couldn't bond with her mum. We have to find out where the mum was exactly during the war but so far it seems to have been London while the children were in Wales and travel was so difficult during the war. The dad of course was fighting overseas.

                          Thanks again for all your help. Much appreciated.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Re evacuees, my mother-in-law was from a large family, and during the war only some of them were evacuated. The teenage ones had already left school, or were nearly there. And the two babies were seen as too young to take from their mother (there was an offer for mum and babies to leave together, which she refused). But my MIL and the other 'middle' children used to go to school in the morning, not knowing when/if they would be taken. It was seen as kinder for them to go without saying goodbye to their mum or siblings. My MIL went away when she was 5, and can still remember how terrified she was. Likewise, during her lifetime MIL's mum never forgot how she felt when she went up to the school and found out that was the day her children went. My MIL was away for 4 years, luckily with a lovely family, but she wasn't with any of her siblings, and she didn't see any family at all during that time (although she got letters). By the time she came home, her older siblings had moved out, and her baby siblings were children who were total strangers. It has affected her whole life, even though logically she can understand why she was sent away, emotionally it has always hurt.
                            Denise

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Denise,

                              There is the Evacuees Reunion Association which I highlighted earlier, which may help to ease some of the pain. I used to be on the Committee for this organisation, the only one that is available.

                              I really do sympathise. The answer I found was to meet up with like minded people and talk through your experiences, write it out for the next generation. Maybe a younger member can help her to put it into writing, record her work. Many are still suffering from the experiences but they do need to let it go in some way for their own sanity. I think you will find that the experience of evacuation during W War 2 affected most people, but all in different ways. Some were very happy, some were isolated and unhappy, some were ill treated. If you think I could help in any way then just send me a PM.

                              Janet

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