17 year old in the RAF in 1947?
Posted: Tue 26 Jan, 2016 10:34 am
Hi,
I'm hoping someone can guide me on a question I have about a family tree.
The family tree has an RAF man marrying a Hong Kong woman in 1950 and going on to have kids with her. But their first child was apparently born before they married with a birth date at the start of 1948. The (potential) issue is that the RAF guy was born in the summer of 1929 and for him to have been the father of this first child he'd have to have been trained and shipped out to Hong Kong by the start of April 1947 which means he would have only been about seventeen years and a couple of months old when he arrived in HK. Is this possible? He was a fireman if that helps work it out.
(I agreed to help start writing up what was already known about this tree before more research is done and military history is not something I know that much about. I've no idea what the time between someone signing up and being deployed would be for the period and whether completing training at 17 outside of wartime was routine or unusual. It's the nearly three year gap between the 1948 child's birth and their 1950 marriage and the guy's young age that's got me wondering if there might have been two relationships/fathers for the mother and kids but I don't want to rock any boats without checking first!)
Help!
Alex
I'm hoping someone can guide me on a question I have about a family tree.
The family tree has an RAF man marrying a Hong Kong woman in 1950 and going on to have kids with her. But their first child was apparently born before they married with a birth date at the start of 1948. The (potential) issue is that the RAF guy was born in the summer of 1929 and for him to have been the father of this first child he'd have to have been trained and shipped out to Hong Kong by the start of April 1947 which means he would have only been about seventeen years and a couple of months old when he arrived in HK. Is this possible? He was a fireman if that helps work it out.
(I agreed to help start writing up what was already known about this tree before more research is done and military history is not something I know that much about. I've no idea what the time between someone signing up and being deployed would be for the period and whether completing training at 17 outside of wartime was routine or unusual. It's the nearly three year gap between the 1948 child's birth and their 1950 marriage and the guy's young age that's got me wondering if there might have been two relationships/fathers for the mother and kids but I don't want to rock any boats without checking first!)
Help!
Alex