22 Kids and Counting took an emotional turn as Sue and Noel Radford dived into their family trees
Sue Radford appeared to get choked up as she made a tragic discovery about her family tree. 22 Kids and Counting couple Sue and Noel Radford decided they wanted to find out about their family history in the latest episode of the Channel 5 series, which airs on Sunday.
Sue and Noel, both adopted, made surprising yet emotional discoveries as they delved into their families’ pasts.
“I think being adopted, I think it just makes you be a bit more curious,” Sue explained. “Noel went looking for his birth mum, but that is not my thing. I really want to find out more about my family.”
Sue hoped to learn more about her great-grandfather, James, and went to Lancashire University to speak with Professor Corinna Peniston-Bird, who found the 1911 census.
It said that Sue’s great-grandfather was 21 and married to a woman named Sarah. The couple had one daughter and were living in Lancaster at the time. He enlisted on September 8 to join the war.
“Why do you think he chose to join?” Sue asked, to which the professor explained, “There was an awful lot of pressure. They were surrounded by propaganda.”
“He ends up in the machine gun corps,” Corinna went on. “The machine guns are particularly important on the front line. It is the first thing the enemies will try to knock out, so people working on the machine gun units were very vulnerable. He would have been in the thick of things.”
“You can’t even imagine, can you, how they must have felt knowing they probably weren’t going to come home?” Sue replied.
“James Thomas Curwen was killed on the 30th of November 1917,” the professor said as she broke the sad news to Sue.
Taking a moment to reflect, Sue said, “If Noel had been sent to war and then he was killed in action and left me with the kids, I just couldn’t imagine it must have been so incredibly difficult. To be honest, I think I would have struggled to have fed them.”
Corrina told Sue that most of the soldiers who were killed in France would never have come home.
“It has made me feel really moved, and it really touches you because as a mum, the least you would expect is to be able to visit your son’s grave,” Sue added. “I want to honour James as one mother on behalf of another mother.”
However, towards the end of the episode, Sue and Noel decided to fly to France to try and find her great-grandfather’s grave and his final resting place.
During their search, Sue got emotional as she said, “I can’t imagine what it was like to say goodbye to your sons. Sending them off to war when they’re still children, really.”
They also realised that the soldiers who were not known just had “A soldier of The Great War Machine Gun Corps” on their gravestones.
“We have looked at every headstone here, and we can’t find James’ name on any of them,” Sue explained.
The couple then checked the monument of the Battle of Cambrai, which had over 7,000 names on it, documenting the names of the soldiers who died, but their bodies were never found.
“That is just the reality of the war back then,” Sue reflected. “The majority did not get found, and they didn’t have headstones, and their names were just written on the stone.”
Things then took an emotional turn as Noel spotted Sue’s great-grandfather’s name on the monument.
“It was emotional when we first saw his name,” Sue stated before adding, “Because it put it into perspective, doesn’t it, that he was my great-grandad.
“It was nice to be able to pay my respects, the send off that couldn’t have been done 109 years ago.”
22 Kids and Counting is available to watch on My5.
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