My paternal grandfather died in 1916 at the Somme six months after his wife (my grandmother) died of TB and he started volunteering for anything and everything earning himself the military medal and enough bars and oak leaves to sink a battleship. My father collected them at the age of six from Buckingham palace after my grandfather died. My maternal grandfather worked on the docks in East London. He was from Waterford but fell out with the family due to his rejectio of Catholicism. I never met him either as he died about ten years before I came along.