H.J.M. has submitted the following:
John and Mary Keightley’s son John Joseph was born in 1876 and he lived with his parents in Silver Street, Yarm until his twenties. At fourteen he was a paper maker and at twenty four a warehouseman - now living with his widowed mother. He married Annie Jane Smith in January 1906 and thereafter the census return for 1911 showed him working in a printing works. John and Annie now lived in Beaumont Street, Bishop Auckland with four children.
John’s service record shows enlistment at Bishop Auckland Recruitment Office not long after the birth of his fifth child Josephine in 1915. It tells of his marriage to Annie at Stokesley register office and the time he “created a disturbance in his hut” and “created a disturbance in a cafe during prohibited hours.” He was admitted to hospital with bronchitis twenty days before his death and died from lobar pneumonia in the New Zealand Stationary Hospital at Wisques (about five miles from St. Omer.) Annie was still at 21 Beaumont Street when she received her husband’s personal effects which included photographs, four pipes (two broken), a pipe lighter and pouch, three diaries, a stamp, and a comb..
He is remembered in Bishop Auckland on B140.03, B140.12 page 13, B140.24 and in South Church on S144.01
