FOUR relatives in one family went to fight in the First World War and only one came back.

Isaac Dash died in Swindon at the age of 90 after fighting in the Boer War and Great War and winning the King’s Medal and Queen’s Medal.

His younger brother Edward ‘Jack’ Dash and nephew Percy Dash perished during the conflict.

The Dash family were related to the great-grandmother of Mark Rooney, who researched his family tree and found many terrible tragedies.

Mark said: “That side of my family really suffered, they received bad news every year and must have spent much of the war waiting for the next telegram.

“They had to deal with unbearable tragedy and I can’t imagine how it must have felt for George, Jack’s father and Percy’s grandfather, to have to deal with such loss.

“They were quite an ordinary family and, sadly, their experience was quite common during the war.

“Most families lost people in the war who had signed up to do their bit for the country and were similarly in mourning.”

‘Jack’ Dash was the family’s first casualty. As a private, he served with the second battalion Wiltshire regiment and died aged 29 on the first day of the Battle of Loos in 1915, posthumously receiving the British War Medal, Victory Medal, and 1914/1915 Star medals.

His name is one of many listed on the Stratton St Margaret Church's War Memorial.

Percy Dash was born in Cricklade and became a private in the Wiltshire Regiments’s fifth battalion. He died in Mesopotamia in April 1916 aged 18 and is buried at the Amara War Cemetery in southern Iraq.

George also lost two sons-in-law: Percy Cooper, his daughter Mabel’s husband, and Francis Taylor, his daughter Lily’s husband.

Mark explained why discovering stories like that of the Dash family and telling them to all who would listen is so important 100 years on from the end of the First World War.

He added: “My grandfather grew up with the aftermath of the war still very visible, and my father knew people who had served in it.

“But today, there’s no-one left and we’re in the longest period of peacetime in our history so it’s easy to forget what it was like and slip back towards war.

“However, the information about those who fought is more freely and widely available than ever before, so we must keep reminding ourselves and the younger generation about what happened back then.

“The main reason to remember their sacrifice is that it’s a lesson from history.

"It also raises awareness of the fact that what happened during the Great War should never happen again - though it did happen again just 25 years later."