Hi all –
(Apologies for the long post, but I wanted to explain the background to my query and offer as much info as I can)
I have two photographs of a young woman that I am trying to identify. It’s a long shot, but I’m wondering whether it is acceptable to post the images here to see if anyone can shed any light on who she might be, given that she is not a biological relation of mine.
Let me explain – my father, Leslie Albert Kinsman, died in 2010, and while my mother and I were in the hospice during his final hours, she told me something that I had never heard before. Apparently, my father had been due to marry another woman about a year or so before he married my mother, so 1944 or 1945. In the event, my father was left standing at the altar. My mother couldn’t tell me who the young woman was, but said she came from Leeds and that was where the marriage was due to have taken place. She also told me that my father had always carried a photo of her in his wallet, and when I went through his effects after he died, I found the photos I referred to above.
The two photos date from 1943 and 1944 – both were taken in professional studios, the earlier one at Empire Studios in Oxford Street, London, the later one at Roberts’s Studio, either at 45, Headrow, Leeds, or 35, Baxtergate, Doncaster on June 4th that year. The later photo is inscribed ‘with love’ to my father, but she hasn’t written her name.
My belief is that the marriage would have been by licence, and with that in mind I contacted the Borthwick Institute in Leeds to see if they had any record of a marriage licence application in my father’s name. They drew a blank, and I’m not sure where else I might be able to look, given that there was no marriage. A licence record would appear to be the only possible official recognition that there was to have been a marriage at all. No mention of an engagement has been found in online newspaper archives.
So, I have two pictures, nominally of a woman from the Leeds area, though one of them was taken in London. Given that my family has no known connections to Leeds, I’m tempted to conclude that the young lady in question may have been in the WRNS – my father was in the RN – and that they met through military service. One of the photos shows some sort of insignia, again possibly military, but the image is not very clear. My father was based at Chatham in Kent, I believe, and served as a stoker, but I have no details of which ship(s) he might have been on, or when.
I’d like to put a name to the face, purely to fill in a gap in my father’s life story, and I have no interest or intention of engaging with the family of the woman in question, if she can be identified, unless they have information they’d like to impart.
Thoughts?
Alan.
