Valentine. #52 ancestors 52 weeks

No great love stories have been handed down through the ages in the family. As children we always imagined that our grandfather Edward Waller LOADES and his wife Jessie May HALL had the great romance. Was this because they were just pictures that we saw and a gold brooch.

My paternal grandparents passed away in a car accident in 1941, the year my father was turning 12. We knew them from the photos that remained and a gold brooch of  Australia with a ship on it. The story we had been told was that the brooch came back from the First world War. The assumption we made was that our grandfather had brought it back to give to his sweetheart. This was a story of fiction.

The brooch was studied during the Diploma of Family History Objects Places and Images. During the course the brooch was taken to Wishart Jewelleries to be repaired and the jeweller was asked about the brooch itself rather than being made in the trenches it was likely manufactured in 1905 in Melbourne. So rather than being a piece of sweetheart jewelery it was likely to be piece of Federation jewelery.

EdwardWaller LOADES did go to the Western Front but his enlistment papers tell us that he was paying money to a Ms Jessie LEAR, this was later changed to his sister Mrs Ethel TILL. No records have been found of Jessie LEAR and her relationship with Edward LOADES.  Was he the geat love of his life? We will never know as she certainly was never mentioned in the family.

Edward returned to Australia from Europe on the Armagh in April 1919. At the time he returned to South Australia he was nearly 30 by the time he returned. In the July of 1919 he married Jessie May HALL. Jessie at the time was 20 years of age. Was this love at first sight. His discharge papers tell us he was living in Gilberton at this tiem with his sister Ethel and her family and this it was likely that he met Jessie as her family lived in the Gilberton Prospect area. As both the HALL and LOADES families lived around the Prospect area did Jessie and EDWARD know it other previously, was there a spark of romance that age pevented anything from happening. Or did the spark come on his return from the Western front looking gallant in his uniform.

The answers to these questions we will never know as they are now lost in the midst of time. We would all like to think that it was a great love story and that was shotened by their untimely deaths.

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