A chance find in a cupboard at the Exchange Hotel has created a mystery for the Blayney RSL sub-branch.
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Who is Kenneth Edmund Kinsela and why were his dog tags in a box full of bits and pieces in a cleaning cupboard?
Discovered by Renee Wilcox as she cleaned the small cupboard out, she handed the dog tags over to Blayney RSL member Ted Tilley.
“We had the Anzac Day breakfast this year at the Exchange and they found this just the day before in a box of junk.
“Why was he there and how long ago?
“We just have no idea and also why would you leave your tags behind?” Mr Tilley asked.
With the help of Reg Rendell they could only find one piece of information.
“He was born on the 16th of September 1925 in Wagga Wagga and enlisted into the RAAF in Sydney,’ Mr Tilley said. “But that’s all we really know.
“This pub, they reckon, is haunted, he could be under the floorboards or something.”
A search by the Blayney Chronicle on Ancestry.com and the Sydney Morning Herald has shown that Mr Kinsela died in Lithgow on October 20, 2001.
A search on Trove, the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation service, has shown up a link with the family’s history with the central west.
His mother, Margaret Mildred Kinsela (Moloney), was born in Lucknow in 1900.
Mr Kinsela also had several brothers and sisters including Margaret, Kevin, Patricia, Brian, Rosemary, John and Grahame and it’s Mr Tilley’s hope that someone can shed light as to why Mr Kinsela’s dog tags were in the Exchange Hotel and if there are any family members who may be interested in securing them.
“Clearly he was in Blayney for some reason but we don’t know when or why?” he said.
What Mr Tilley cannot understand either is why no one has accessed his military records.
“We want to find his relatives but no one from his family have opened his military records so we can’t track them,” he said.
If anyone knows anything about the life of Kenneth Kinsela please contact the Blayney Chronicle on 0418 223 440 or 6368 2132
Mark Logan
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
