In my previous post about my mother's death, I showed my father's year of birth as 1923. I had a good reason for doing that - documentary proof, no less.

I still have my father's Army paybook. I was aware that the date of birth shown is incorrect - the day and month are wrong, which I know from so many years of celebrating my father's birthday. But that wasn't a surprise. He told me that he'd lied about his age in order to get into the Army. I assumed he'd just shifted the date a few months.

He had to try three times to get in: the first time the recruiting sergeant booted him out for being obviously too young. The second time he was rejected on medical grounds (a stomach problem). The third time, and under the watchful, but this time more tolerant, gaze of the same recruiting sergeant, he succeeded.

He joined on 19 Nov 1942, signing up for seven years with the Colours and five in the reserves.

According to the Army records, he was 19.

I found it intriguing that even the Army wasn't that sure. His Certificate of Service, given to him on his discharge from the Regular Army shows a different date of enlistment - 14 Oct 1942 - and his year of birth as 1924. I also have a Release Leave Certificate, issued in 1949, that shows his date of enlistment as 19 Nov 1942, which has been struck out and rewritten as 14 Oct 1942.

And so I decided to do a little digging.

Annoyingly, most of the services available online for checking birth records demand a fee. Although they are exploiting government records, paid for by our taxes, they want you to pay for accessing information that should be freely available. The UK Government, in the form of the General Register Office (GRO), is working towards making many of these records available online. In the meantime, there's an admirable effort in the form of FreeBMD (where BMD means Births, Marriages and Deaths), which has already put millions of records online for free. The information may not be as detailed as the paid-for services, but it did allow me to pin down the year of may father's birth - 1925.

So, when he joined up he was actually 17. At that time, the minimum age for conscription was 18 (and had been 20 at the outbreak of war).

No wonder he looks so young in all his army photos.

My mother died last night. And I have a lot of work to do in deciphering what that means for me - none of which I intend to share here.

But it did make me think about what we take with us when we go. All that unrecorded history.

My mother had a lot to say, and never said it.

We know a little of it: her memories of seeing Hermann Göring drive by in his open-top Mercedes; of the Gestapo turning up at her doorstep demanding to know why she wasn't in the Hitler birthday parade; of the bombing of Hamburg.

And there were painful memories of the early years living in a London suburb, babe in arms, her British husband posted back to Germany, surrounded by hostile people with fresh memories of the Blitz.

Yet there must have been so much more, now gone forever.

The picture shows my father, John (19231925-1991*), mother and my eldest brother Harry (thankfully still with us). I think it must have been taken in 1947 in Hamburg.

  * UPDATE: My father's year of birth has been somewhat clouded in mystery - see 'Lying about one's age'.