Clearing out the house…

I am getting a bit rusty at the ol’ blogs! I haven’t written one in ages; it’s because I haven’t had much free time in the last few months.

Thanks to the recession, I finally got around to buying a small little house in my home town of Kinsale.  The previous owner passed away in 2008 and I went over to clear out the property at the weekend.

Amongst the previous owner’s belongings, were a couple of World War One medals which I wanted to share with ye. They were in their original envelope and addressed to a Mrs C Ahern of Higher Street, Kinsale, County Cork. Her husband must have died in the war..

When I opened the envelope, there were two little boxes inside.

On the sides of the boxes, it read: “James Ahern Dec’d”

Must have been awful for his wife to open the envelope and receive these in the post.

Inside each of the boxes, was an accompanying letter:

The first one had a Buckingham Palace Letterhead…

And the medal her husband never got to hold:

And this letter came with the other medal (dated 28th February, 1922):

And the medal:

I kept all the old photographs that were in the house.  They have names written on the back of the photographs identifying who is who, so I will post them on here when I get a chance.  Maybe people will be trying to piece a family history together and they may be of use to someone out there…

I downloaded his card from the National Archives Website, it doesn’t give much information other than his year of birth, which is 1874

There you have it now…

Ages ago I found another World War One Medal, read all about that here