15/06/2025
Name : Lindsay Bamfield
Location : Melbourne, Australia
Title : The Lost Sons of Susannah Nelson
Review : I read this book with enjoyment and interest, although inevitably any account about war experiences promises to be harrowing and this book had its share of stories of the appalling events and conditions that soldiers of the Great War endured. But there are lighter aspects too, especially the families’ lives settling in Australia. I enjoyed reading of Jim Nelson’s adventures on the London Underground during a period of war-time convalescence in England and was interested that he had a stay in a Bristol hospital near where I grew up. Blending family stories, handed down through the generations, with facts verified through intensive research from a variety of sources, Lindsay Ferguson has pieced together the history of her great-grandparents’ sons who fought in the Great War. A skillfully told family history dating from the mid-nineteenth century, Ferguson traces her forebears’ passages to Australia and the stories of their settlement. She employs some fictional elements, backed up by family photographs, to bring the characters to life for the reader. The outbreak of war saw five of the Nelson brothers join up along with two of their nephews at different stages of the war and their experiences are charted through war diaries, documents and historical fact. Set against the factual aspects of the war with significant detail the experiences of these men always stay at the centre of the narrative. Every soldier’s story is different, which is clearly illustrated by those of the Nelson men. The public has mourned and remembered those who were lost in the war but many of those who returned had even sadder stories as Ferguson’s research attests. With charts explaining the family tree and the organisation of the AIF during the war, numerous photographs from history archives and the family collection, plus useful endnotes on each chapter, the narrative carefully draws the private and public together. The end result is a personal family story but also a social history and a history of the war campaigns in which the Nelson men fought written in an accessible manner for any reader. An extensive bibliography is also included.