About This Site

I built this site to share my great-grandfather Andrew Murray Robertson's things: his wartime diary, letters to his cousin Doris, and the documents, photographs, and objects he kept. Everything here, the transcriptions, the research, every identification of a name or place, is my own work, checked and re-checked against the material itself.

Where the originals came from. Robertson died in 1971. His papers passed to his daughter, then to her nephew, my father, and then to me. As far as I know, nothing is missing. I photographed everything myself between 2025 and 2026 on my own phone, and the scans on this site are those photographs.

How the transcription works. Each diary entry sits beside a photograph of the original page. The transcription keeps his spelling and abbreviations as he wrote them, and a word I couldn't read is marked [?]. Days he left blank are grouped and marked as gaps rather than skipped. In 1915 he kept a second notebook alongside the main diary, and in other years some days have a loose sheet: where a day has both, use the arrows above the scan to switch.

What is his and what is mine. The transcription is Robertson's words. The coloured boxes, the bracketed notes, and the pop-ups that open when you tap an underlined term are mine.

The site was built with Claude Code. I made every decision about what to include and how to present it, and used it as the tool to build and maintain the site.

If you recognize a name, spot an error, or have material of your own to add, I'd love to hear from you.