Guardsman Raymond Shone, 2621679, Grenadier Guards, 5th Bn, 27 June 1944, 33, Son of Charles and Harriet Shone of Spon Green; husband of Ellen Shone, of Saltney, Chester, Bolsena War Cemetery, Italy. Left four children.
Obit found at Find a Grave
From the Chester Chronicle, 3rd August 1944
Mr & Mrs Chas Shone, Spitalfields, Buckley have received news that their eldest son Gunner Raymond Shone has been killed in action. Gunner Shone was 33 & had been in the forces for nearly 4 years & overseas for 12 months. He was wounded in January. Was married & leaves a wife & four children who live at 168 High Street, Saltney. Before the war he was employed at Messrs Wall & Son at Saltney.
Raymond married Ellen Price at St Mark’s Saltney in 1933. His family tree can be traced with reasonable certainty as follows:
Raymond was born 22 Feb 1911 to parents Charles Shone and Harriet Higginson, grandparents George Shone and Mary Catherall. All lived in the Spittalfields/Spon Green area of Buckley. I believe that the grandfather George was born c. 1840, the son of William Shone and Jane Edwards. This George is found in the 1841, 1851 and 1861 censuses with ages consistent with birth in 1840. But when George Shone, father William, married Mary Catherall 3 Feb 1873, St Mary Chester, his age was recorded as 28 when it should have been 33. George is again 5 years younger in the 1881 and subsequent census returns. I cannot explain this discrepancy. George and William are common names even within the Shone surname but I have not found any records that show there was another George with father William. Assuming I have the correct George, the next generation is William Shone and Jane Edwards, connecting then to an extensive Shone genealogy.
Bolsena War Cemetery is situated on the eastern side of Lake Bolsena just west of the SS2, between Rome (104 kilometres) and Siena (115 kilometres). The site for the cemetery was chosen in November 1944, and graves were brought in from the battlefields between Bolsena and Orvieto. Almost one-third of those buried at Bolsena were South Africans. In 1947, 42 graves were brought into the cemetery (into Plot 4 Rows G and H) from the Island of Elba. The cemetery is on the actual site of the first camp occupied by General Alexander’s advanced headquarters after the liberation of Rome and it was here that King George VI visited General Alexander at the end of July 1944. Bolsena War Cemetery contains 597 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 40 of them unidentified. The cemetery was designed by Louis de Soissons.
CWGC
Raymond was a 4th cousin once removed of Peter Kelsall