ooohh, I love a mystery ...

It's been an interesting few days since I last posted. The history student and I exchanged emails and information. Then I once again did a search on my great-great grandfather, Arthur Manuel Hall. This time I got a result that I had never seen before. I think it may be because the file I found was updated since I last performed a search. Anyways, I found a photo of Arthur and a comment left by a man who said he was Arthur's grandson. The problem was the man in the photo did not look like our Arthur. All of the other details were correct.

I managed to track the grandson down on facebook. He is my grandmother's first cousin. They had lost touch probably fifty to sixty years ago. He emailed me two pictures that he had of our grandfather Arthur, one of them also showing my great-grandfather Arthur Jr. The man in the photo that I posted on my blog last year is definitely not Arthur!

Ok, so maybe this is why I was being kicked in the pants about Arthur. I had incorrectly identified him. Well actually it was my grandmother. She had said that is the only person who her picture could be. Apparently she was wrong.

So now we have a mystery man. I have been sharing my new found information with my grandmother hoping that something might jog her memory. So far no luck.

In the meantime I blew up the photo of the mystery man and this is what I see.

1. It appears that he may be an amputee. You'll notice his legs are crossed, but where is his right foot?

2. The woman in the picture is wearing what looks like a nurse's uniform.

3. The man's hair is moppy, like someone who might have been convalescing and not on active duty.

4. The man does not have the maple leaf pin on his collar like the others do in the previous photographs. This means that he could be a British soldier. Their uniforms were very similar except the Canadians wore the maple leaf on their collar.

So who is this mytery man? My grandmother says there was definitely no mention of any relatives becoming amputees during the war (of course we know now that she may not be the most reliable source!). Perhaps it is a mystery woman that we are looking for. My great-great grandfather had four daughters. Perhaps one of them served as a wartime nurse. Maybe one of the couple in the photograph is a relative from England. Maybe I'll never know, but at least I'll have some fun trying to solve this puzzle.