Sidney was born in 1894 in Bermondsey, the son of Ellen and William Easton Palmer and the youngest of seven children. When Sidney was just a few months old his father, working as a lighterman on the River Thames, sustained injuries in an accident and died. Times were hard for the family for a while, but, after a brief time in a children's home, Sidney and his siblings returned to live with their mother. Sidney's life, until he was 18, was spent in Bermondsey with his family and in the 1911 census it shows that he was working as a 'van guard boy'. In 1912, at 18 years old Sidney joined the army, enlisting at Woolwich.

As a professional soldier and a member of the British Expeditionary Force, he was sent to France very early in the war and on the 7th of November 1914, at twenty years old, Sidney was killed near Ypres. He has no known grave. His name is on the Menin Gate Memorial.

These are the bare facts as I know them and that I have been able to put together because Sidney was never spoken about by his family after his death as far as anyone alive today can remember.

As such, it can seem a little remote, this event, your death, impersonal for those of us alive today. But it's not impersonal at all. In fact I feel like I should introduce myself to you, Sidney. Your sister Daisy was my great grandmother. I never met her, just as I never met you, she died the year before I was born but she was the person who brushed my grandmother's hair as a little girl as she probably brushed yours, the youngest of her siblings, and just as her little girl, my grandmother, brushed mine. And when you think about it like that, I don't think we are such distant relations after all.

Everyone who was mothered by your big sister Daisy tells me the same thing. That she took good care of them and that she liked to have fun. I like to think that it was the same for you. Being 10 years older than you, I think she would have been one of the people who looked after you, that you shared a special bond, perhaps you played games together and threw snowballs in the street. I know that later you lived with her and her husband and your mother too. I'm sure that Daisy must have loved you, her baby brother, and if it hadn't been too hard, she would have talked about you and told your stories too.

My grandmother was born nearly 3 years after you died but her older sisters lived in the same house with you when they were small. The oldest, Nellie, was five when you enlisted so I imagine she would have remembered you. She died too young though, as you did too, to share her stories. Your brother William enlisted a short while after you died. He served as a stretcher bearer on the Western Front. I imagine he would have risked his life for many men on the battlefield, when he tried to bring them home to their families. I think there will have been times there when he thought of you. William survived the First World War but he was killed in a bombing raid on London in WWII.

Somewhere in between the people who knew you and loved you there seems to have been a generation or two who knew nothing of you because they didn't even know to ask. And yet, here I am, in 2014 and with the power of the internet and not that much searching, I found you. I know you were born and that you died, although not much of the time in between.

Today, 100 years to the day after your death, I visited the Tower of London to see the poppies that have been planted there in an act of remembrance. One for every man or woman from the Commonwealth who died in the Great War. There is one there for you.

You did not grow old and age did not weary you but I know that there is so much that you would wished to have done with your life. Your sisters who were older than you lived to see the world change so much. They lived to see every man and woman over 18 get the vote. They had telephones and televisions and saw people travel on aeroplanes as casually as if they were taking a bus. They lived to see a man walk on the moon. There was a whole world of possibilities. I did not know you but I know you will have had hopes and dreams. I shall put them with my own.

If you had a grave I would place a poppy on it but since you don't, if I visit Ypres, I shall find your name on the Menin Gate and the names of the men who fought and died with you too. You are remembered as a son and a brother and now as a great great uncle. You are not forgotten anymore.

Joanna Smith