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  • Any ideas here?

    I'm helping my sister in law do her tree. We've done quite well except for a small problem of Leslie Melhuish.

    We thought Leslie was her father's cousin who lived with the family (Samuel Baxter Melhuish, Edith Helen Melhuish, and children Marjorie (1906) and Donald (1915).
    However we have found Leslie on the 1911 census (born 1908) living as son with all the above except the as yet unborn, Donald.

    Fair enough. We will accept him as an uncle and buy the cert, but.....our biggest mystery is what happened to Leslie after his childhood.

    The whole family were into fishing, boating, etc and Donald and Leslie both went off fishing with Samuel. Story goes Leslie went off to somewhere in Asia (Singapore and Malaysia have been mentioned) about 1939, so he didn't have to go to war. Obviously he didn't make a great choice as later history would prove, but how on earth do we start looking for any trace of him??

    Apparently he either owned or worked on a plantation there.

    We just don't know where to start looking. Neither of us know enough about the history of people during wartime to hazard a guess as to where an English man would try to go or do.

  • #2
    That is a dilema Libby.

    Chances are that if he was in Singapore when it fell he'd have been interned in Changi and might even have ended up on the Burma railway. I doubt whether any death would have been recorded with the British authorities.
    Last edited by JBee; 10-08-15, 12:47.



    Researching Irish families: FARMER, McBRIDE McQUADE, McQUAID, KIRK, SANDS/SANAHAN (Cork), BARR,

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    • #3
      I think the fall of Singapore happened very rapidly.
      If he'd been in Malaya (a much larger area, far less densely populated) there would have been a greater chance of escaping. I have read that some small communities in Sarawak/Borneo managed to remain undiscovered for the duration of the war.
      I believe there are some Red Cross records of POWs somewhere on line. How complete these are (whether they're just for the camps in Europe or include the Far East) I have no idea, but certainly worth a try, I would have thought.
      Have you used consular marriage & death overseas indexes & CWGC for elimination purposes?

      Jay
      Last edited by Janet in Yorkshire; 10-08-15, 16:27.
      Janet in Yorkshire



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

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