Correcting false assumptions

 

                                     There was still a shop that dealt in tobacco at 180 Shooters Hill Road when I visited

 

In my last post, I placed one of my sets of grandparents in Croydon at the time of WWII. I suppose that was because I associated them with the house and area that live in my memory. But that house came later. When war was declared in 1939, they were actually living on Shooters Hill Road in Greenwich. I knew that was their address at one point but forgot that it was during the war period. I really should make a timeline of their movements so that I have a handy reference while I do this look back into the war period.

A check of the Bomb Sight maps shows that this area of Greenwich was also in the bombers' path. The family lived in a small strip of shops which had living quarters above. There were no direct hits to the shopping area but a parachute mine landed about a block away and there was also a cluster of high explosive bombs which fell on an area about 2 blocks away.

As stated in my last post, the other set of grandparents lived close to the docks. So close that the name of the street they lived on was Dock Street. There were no direct hits on Dock Street but many bombs landed in the area and it looks like there were areas close by which received bomb hits that were in such tight cluster that they can't be shown singly on the map. Some of those hits were at St. Katherines Dock which was the dock closest to Dock Street.

At the pub on Dock Street where they lived, I was able to bring up the names of my grandparents and the children who were still living at home on another handy research tool for this time period, the 1939 Register. But there were only four children listed. I'll have to have a look for the rest to see where they were in 1939.

As for the 1939 Register for Greenwich, I can only see the listing for my shopkeeping grandfather and none for my grandmother. I thought maybe she was living elsewhere, but I found no matching listing in the rest of England on the 1939 Register nor did I find any passenger list to show that she had left the country. I'll need to do some more digging.

So far, my initial forays into my WWII family research have given pretty typical results. They have been interesting but inconclusive and have left me with a list of things to do. That list is:

 

Sources:

Bomb Sight http://bombsight.org

Find My Past – 1939 Register