warning: ancient crone blood

MOM: did you ever want a pony growing up? was that just me? is that a British thing?
ME: I wanted to have a psychic connection to a horse. we would be BFFs and fight evil together, probably. also once people realized we were soul-bonded, it wouldn't matter if I "owned" the horse because capitalism and concepts of ownership and property would not be able to keep us apart.
MOM: ... ... ...
ME: does that mean yes?

Since I'm hitting a paywall on Ancestry (which apparently holds most of the UK military records on WW I but I may be able to access through a local library), I thought I'd take another route to try to determine which regiment my g-grandfather was in. This is also useful since he had a fairly generic Irish name, and it will help narrow things down once I *do* get access.

I am actually kind of proud that I think I figured it out?

I know from oral history from several relatives several battles he was in, that he was injured, and bits and pieces of the name of parts of the branches he served in. (He was in a fusilier branch, for example, that was from Northern Ireland. Not sharing too much atm because don't want to doxx myself.)

Anyway, I basically figured out that he was in the Irish Guard, then narrowed it down to which of the three branches he was in at the time. Then I figured out which battalion was present in each of the battles family oral history accounts states that he was in.

Now, caveats of course: oral history is unreliable, and he also could theoretically have been switched around between multiple battalions due to injuries etc.

But I'm pretty sure that if family info is accurate and he was in one unit the entire time, I've got it narrowed down.

Doing some reading of first person accounts of those battles, I can totally understand why he would *never talk about the War*, why he wouldn't mind my mom cutting up his medals' ribbons for doll clothes, and guess there were a lot of complicated survivor guilt feelings not unlike friends I've known who lived through the AIDS crisis. This is part of why I'm doing this research -- not so much "what things did my family do" but "how did the events my family lived through likely shape intergenerational family and behavioral patterns?"

(Also, wow, that type of information is *super* scattered across the interwebs. It was also hard to find on websites I find "reliable", though that could be because I haven't done enough research in this area to know which ones to look in. Still, win!)

I also couldn't help thinking that finally all those school math(s) problems of, "If Anna sits next to Bob and Susan sits next to Derek and..." actually were paying off.

In some of the letters we have, I found out that another Great-Grandfather fought in WWI. He's the one where there was a huge family rift over a will and a second wife, though, so I have no information other than "he fought in WWI and then he was a coal miner and then the family rift over a will and a second wife." Digging may have to wait til Ancestry access.