Lives in Time
From birth to death, personal milestones and world events unfolding together — individual lives woven through the history that shaped them.
Each timeline on this page maps a single life from birth to death — placing personal milestones alongside the world events that ran concurrently with them. Family moments, employment, military service, and captivity sit beside coronations, wars, revolutions, and social change, so that each ancestor can be seen not just as a name in a family tree but as a person living through a specific and turbulent stretch of history. Events are colour-coded by type. The evidence and sources behind each life are explored in full in the Ancestor Stories section.
Timelines
-
Robert Edward Butt
1886-1969
Electrician · Soldier · Prisoner of War
Captured at the Battle of the Aisne in September 1914 after less than 24 hours on the frontline, Robert spent four years and four months imprisoned across six camps in Germany and Latvia — surviving starvation, forced labour, and sub-zero reprisal conditions that killed dozens of his fellow prisoners. He returned to Oundle in 1919, resumed his job at Oundle School, and worked there for another three decades.
-
Arthur James Grimshaw
1891-1983
Engine Room Artificer · Naval Instructor
Enlisted in March 1913, Arthur spent the next two world wars in the engine rooms of Royal Navy warships — bombarding the Belgian coast in 1914, fighting at Gallipoli and Heligoland Bight, and leading the German High Seas Fleet into surrender in the Firth of Forth in November 1918. He retired in 1935 after twenty-two years' service, was recalled in 1940, and served again until 1945. He died at home in Southsea aged ninety-one.
-
Family Member
Dates
Role/s
Text