John and Chris Shaw would like to hear from anyone who has any information on First World War serviceman, John Roy Smith.
John Roy Smith was born to Thomas and Mary Smith at Liverpool in March 1897. He had a sister named Elizabeth, not sure if she was older or younger. The family moved to Mosman where he worked at the Mosman Post Office as a Postal Assistant. He enlisted with the AIF in June 1915 at the age of 18 years and embarked for overseas service in September 1915. He was wounded twice during his service and was killed in action in July 1917 in Belgium.
My grandmother, Ivy Lillian Buckman lived at 5 Cardinal Street Mosman and John lived in Bardwell Road, opposite my grandmother’s home. Ivy gave birth to a child in January 1913. This child was my father. The baby was baptised Herbert Roy Buckman, taking Ivy’s name. On the Baptism Certificate, a John Smith was named as a witness.
Ivy then met and married Leslie Harold Shaw in January 1914 and subsequently had six more siblings. Herbert Roy Buckman’s name then became Herbert Roy Shaw, along with the other siblings.
Throughout her life, she carried the photo of John Roy Smith with her but never spoke of it with the family except for one son, revealing to him before she died that Herbert Roy had a different father but he was not told who the father was. He passed this on to me years later just before he died. So from there our search began.
Now that we have matched our photograph the one in the Mosman archives named John Roy Smith, we would like to establish if John Roy Smith was the child’s father or just a good neighbourhood friend.
We hope that the contributor of the photo may have more information about the family, so as we can verify this one way or the other. If John Roy Smith is the father of Herbert Roy Buckman, then he would be my biological grandfather.