The daughter of a British WWI solider has been reunited with her dad's war medals which were being sold on eBay. Adam Simpson-York, 37, looks out for war medals being sold online and then tries tracking down their owners' relatives.
Two weeks ago he found three medals – a Victory Medal, a British War Medal and a 1914-1915 Star –belonging to Sergeant Thomas Ernest Lineker, an imports manager who fought in the Great War. Using the basic details - name and Royal Army Medical Corps information - on the medals, he built a family tree using online resources.
Finally he found the soldier’s granddaughter Daryl Bonas through her children on Facebook. He was astonished to hear Thomas' daughter, Brenda Lineker, 82 was still alive, and living in the same house in East Ham, London, where her father lived.
The family traced the eBay seller to an antique shop in Portsmouth who sold the trio to them for £65 - the price he bought them for. They have been reunited with two other medals Brenda already had.
Thomas' granddaughter Daryl, 61, from Barking, said: "My son and daughter got a message from Adam. It seemed initially a bit strange, but he said where he was from and that he had got some medals.
“He told me that an antiques shop near Portsmouth was selling them. I contacted them and explained what had happened and I bought them for £65.
“Because they were going back to the family, the person I bought them off was happy to sell them for the same price as he paid. He said he wasn’t going to make much profit on it anyway and getting things back to the family is what they want as well.”
She said recovering the medals prompted her aunt Brenda to dig out old birth and death certificates which led them to trace back their relatives to 1830s Birmingham. How the medals escaped the family is a mystery but Daryl said her aunt was glad to see them return home where she will unite them with the other two.
Daryl said: “She was chuffed. My son likes WW1 memorabilia and she is happy for us to have them and we are going to put all five medals in a display case. My son also has a cap badge from the Royal Army Medical Corps.”
Sergeant Lineker was born in 1897 and lived until 1970. He was still a teenager at the outbreak of the war and Daryl said she would like to see his service record so that she could see where he fought. After the war he returned to East Ham where he worked for a shipping company in the docklands.
He fathered Brenda at 43 years old and he had three brothers who also fought in WW1 and who may also have medals that have been lost. Daryl believes her grandfather was the eldest of his brothers because it was custom to call the eldest Thomas, as with her father, Thomas Ronald Lineker, who passed away in 2000.
She also said the legendary singer Dame Vera Lynn had family on the same East Ham street where he father and grandparents lived. She explained: "I think it was her aunt and uncle. She was in her early teens and she would come and visit and take my dad out in the pram when he was a baby."
Adam, a postman from Ipswich, began researching medals out of boredom and he now has nearly 4,000 followers on his Facebook page, Medals Going Home. He said: “When we went into lockdown over Christmas, I started buying medals and trying to trace the families and I found I could do it quite well.
“I’ve kept it ticking over in the background. Almost every day I look on eBay, see what medals there are, start researching them and contact the living relatives and make them aware that their ancestors’ medals are being sold.
“Families are getting back something that their ancestors held or touched and had on them. Nine times out of ten we don’t find out how it ended up out of the family, no idea where it has been for the last 100 years, but it’s quite special for some people.”
Adam has also helped to return other items, such as a farmer’s old diary and a swagger stick, a short staff with a silver head that was carried by British soldiers of the WW1 era. “People send me stuff in the post and name it medal man," he said.
"They’re a lot harder to do though. When they are on eBay the medals have a name and number on it. I put that on Ancestry and if I get enough information on that I can start building a family tree.”
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