So the first prompt is the word FIRST. We can interpret this any way we like, but I thought I would go back to the beginning.
My sister started things off with trying to find our paternal grandfather - Charles Sawyer. We were told that he had left the family some time in the 1930s. Dad didn't know all that much, except he saw him sometimes in town (i.e. the city centre of Melbourne) - apparently our grandfather worked in a cafe or milk bar. Our grandmother would not talk about him and was purported to hate the English because of him!
Not sure if the very FIRST thing we did was to get a copy of Dad's birth certificate or a copy of the marriage certificate between his parents. Needless to say all this was after our father had passed away and we could no longer ask him for more information. We only had the very little that he had told us in the past.
My sister reminded me that Dad had been called out of class at school to say goodbye to his father when he (Charles) went off to war. And Dad's sister tells about seeing a man in army uniform loitering near where they lived, and being calling her indoors by her grandmother. And one other story, is that Grandma (his ex) saw him in a newsreel that showed soldiers boarding a ship to go off the war.
My next step was to get his war record from the National Archives, for which I had to pay a hefty sum - but it is now digitised and freely available to anyone else who wants to research Charles Sawyer. Around about this time, my sister opened up an account on Ancestry.com, set up a fairly basic family tree, and we have gone on from there.
We have since been in contact with other members of the Sawyer family, including one who met Charles when he visited England in the 1950s. But we have more work to do and I suspect that we may never quite pin Charles down.
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