Even When Inaccurate Photo Captions Can Be Valuable

“Here are four brothers who enlisted for active service and trained in this city [London, Ontario]. They are the quartet of Hinschliffes [Hinscliffe], cousins of Mrs. Mathews [Matthews], of 286 [285] Thames street, whose husband and son, both Johns [Jack and John], are in Belgium with the 18th Battalion: From left to right they are James Hinschliffe, of Stratford, who left London with the 24th Battalion. Samuel Hinschcliffe, of Grovenor street, London, a member of the 29th Battery of Artillery, on the heights; Harold Hinschliffe, of Wingham, a bugler for the 71st Battalion, and Harry, of the same town and corps.

As you can see by this photograph there are many errors but a little detective work goes a long way to “fixing” this.

1. A search of the LAC Archives Database for First World Soldiers finds no soldiers under the name Hinschliffe but by assuming that the first 5 letters of the name were correct a search using the ‘*’ operator finds 24 results. Out of these 7 are named Hinscliffe. Since the database has not have any duplicate forenames finding James, Samuel, Harold, and Harry was simplified.
2. Searching for Matthews was problematic. Going on the assumption that the person writing the caption had also misspelled the names (after manually quickly searching under the surname Mathews at the database and finding no evidence of a father and son) paper records came to the rescue.
3. Using the 1915 Nominal Roll I was able to find the precise soldiers of the 18th Battalion mentioned in the photo caption. Mathews is actually Matthews; the father goes by Jack and the son goes by John, and the address is incorrect.

Pulling up these 18th Battalion soldiers’ regimental numbers confirmed their identities and biographical details.

Of these six men only Jack Richards Matthews (reg. no. 53357) son, John Richard Matthews (reg. no. 54288), did not survive the war.

Below is some documentation related to this post: