James Frederick Gillies

This postcard is all I began with

I'm wasn't familiar with the handwriting on this one at first but after a lot of comparisons it would seem my Grandmother wrote different with a pencil than when she was writing with a pen.. Corporal J. Gillies proved a tough one at first as the army records listed him as the rank of private to start with.  It turned out that he joined the Lancashire fusiliers in August 1914 and left the army after being disabled by a gun shot wound to the leg . His army number was 3406. Overall I managed to obtain about ten pages of his army records and not really much else. Luckily for me there were not too many J. Gillies living in Stockton Heath back in 1914 .James Frederick had a brother John Reginald Gillies and a father James Gillies. It would seem that my Grandmother and her family would have known James senior as he was the local tea dealer based on Walton Road , Stockton Heath in the community where my Grandmother was growing up on the farm.