Victor John Mead 1897-1915

This is the first of several posts about my Grand Uncle, Victor John Mead. I knew he had died in WW1 and was keen to find out more. Whilst searching to see if FLA had served in WW1, I had joined The Great War Forum. The people on there were incredibly helpful and if anyone wants to know about WW1, I would highly recommend the forum and its sister site The Long, Long Trail as good places to start.

My local library had a copy of the index to the National Roll of the Great War. The National Roll of the Great War is a 14 volume series of short biographical sketches of British soldiers who served, including some who died, in World War 1. The volumes are arranged geographically according to where the soldier was from. To buy the books is very expensive but I discovered that there were members on the forum who had access to some of the volumes, or had downloaded pages from Military-Genealogy. I posted a message asking if anyone had a copy of the page with my Grand Uncle on and was delighted to receive a reply the following day offering to send me a copy of the page! Pushing my luck I asked if he had the page before which would feature my paternal Grandfather, Denys Mead. Incredibly, he had only ever downloaded 5 pages from Military-Genealogy, none featuring the people he wanted, but he had both pages that I wanted - amazing! In future posts I'll write about where he died, where he is buried, his medals and his age.