by ermin79 » Sat Sep 24, 2016 3:11 pm
Thanks Adrian. His next of kin as named on the effects records on Ancestry, and on the will Jesse made, was his sister. She never married and had no children, so I can only assume that the medals were either returned by her or their father, who was still living, or they were sold by the family later on.
On a tangent slightly, on the other side of my family there was the story (duely copied by a local historian into a book on a history of their village) that the father of a soldier sent back the son's medals in his grief and that they "are now in the Imperial War Museum". However that is not the case according to the museum and as (no disrespect intended) my relative was an average recruit, not awarded the VC or other medal for bravery for example, I did wonder why they were likely to have them in the first place. I suspect in that case it looked nicer in print than the truth.