![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/files\/2020\/04\/Unknown-soldier.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u200bPost by Anna Petersen, Curator Photographs<\/p>\n
These past twenty years have certainly proved a boon time for putting names to previously unidentified photographs of people and places.\u00a0 As cultural institutions and private individuals all over the world continue to digitise their collections and create searchable databases, new information emerges on a daily basis that brings new life to images formerly prone\u00a0to be\u00a0cast aside.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Recently the Hocken received one such portrait of a soldier.\u00a0 The donor had come upon it in the SPCA Op Shop at North East Valley, Dunedin,\u00a0and could not bear to leave the strapping young man to oblivion.\u00a0 The back of the print offered no clues as to his identity and all the Op Shop keeper\u00a0knew was that the photograph came from a house in Waitati.<\/p>\n
The donor, Marinus La Rooij, who happens to be an Otago history graduate, then made it a mission to discover all he could about the man’s identity.\u00a0 Firstly he reached out to the Facebook group, Unknown Warriors of the NZEF<\/a>, sending them a cell phone snap of the photograph.\u00a0From the C,7 written on the military\u00a0cap badge, they were able to link the soldier\u00a0to the Canterbury Battalion, Seventh Reinforcement,\u00a0which enlisted in mid-1915, went to Suez and moved on to the Western Front.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Matching other known portraits from relatives, it did not take\u00a0long for\u00a0the Facebook group also to\u00a0provide\u00a0the soldier’s name and army registration number as\u00a0Robert William\u2019 Leslie\u2019 Wilson 6\/2962.\u00a0 Equipped\u00a0with these crucial details, the donor was then\u00a0free to\u00a0search\u00a0and find Private Lesley’s army service file online at Archives NZ.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n As it turned out, this person was not a local lad but the son of William and Margaret Wilson of Belfast in Canterbury.\u00a0 He worked as a farmer in Belfast before enlisting in the army at the age of 21.\u00a0 Leslie Wilson had dark brown hair\u00a0and blue eyes and, though smaller than he perhaps\u00a0looks in his\u00a0photograph standing just 5’4″, was deemed fit and ready for service.\u00a0 Sadly, like so many other fine young men whom we pause to remember on ANZAC Day, Robert William Leslie Wilson died far from home, of wounds received in action at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.\u00a0 He was just 23 years old.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n Thanks to our donor, a copy of this portrait has now\u00a0been uploaded to Robert\u00a0Wilson’s\u00a0record on the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Online Cenotaph database, where you can leave him a virtual poppy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n And\u00a0the original photograph is now safely housed in the Hocken Photographs Collection and readily accessible to researchers under the reference number, P2020-011<\/a>.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Email from the donor,\u00a022 March 2020.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Email from the donor, 23 March 2020.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> AABK 18805 W5557 0124077 R22021950, Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga, Wellington, New Zealand.\u00a0https:\/\/ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz\/delivery\/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE21241794<\/a>\u00a0\u200b<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u200bPost by Anna Petersen, Curator Photographs These past twenty years have certainly proved a boon time for putting names to previously unidentified photographs of people and places.\u00a0 As cultural institutions and private individuals all over the world continue to digitise their collections and create searchable databases, new information emerges on a daily basis that brings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15310,15348,15412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anzac-day","category-historical-photographs","category-world-war-i"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/thehockenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}