My family has had an ongoing interest in WWI. Maybe it is watching so much BBC, starting with "Upstairs, Downstairs", then "Brideshead Revisited" and most recently "Downton Abbey". The interest also extends to books. We avidly read all the Charles Todd mysteries, and more recently, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. This morning I read this article, and found the archives with the digitized journals- what a treasure trove for historians!
As a genealogist, I have found that one of my great-grandfathers served in WWI, but in the Italian army, even though he lived in the US. We have a photo taken of him in Palermo, Sicily, in full uniform. My grandmother remembered him going to war, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters.
More interesting is my great-grandfather-in-law, who was inadvertently key to the creation of Bletchley Park in WWII... His story is told in David Kahn's Seizing the Enigma. Because the story of his war service and adventures are not told beyond this even, I should record it to preserve it for posterity.
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