April is here, which apart from Easter, is the month to commemorate Anzac Day (at least for us here in Australia and New Zealand) and Auckland Libraries have issued the Anzac Day Blog Challenge again.

You know it was this time last year when they held the same Blog Challenge that it made me realise  just how little I knew about my military ancestors. Who of them actually went to war? Where did they go? What was their rank? … and so on. So I made it my mission over the past year to rectify that. And while I’m no expert on any of them yet, I did kept the folk at the National  Archives of Australia busy by ordering copies of a heap of my reli’s which I’ve been going through slowly.

ANZAC Day is upon us again, so I thought I’d share some interesting and often unknown facts about ANZACS and ANZAC Day, so others will understand why we honour this national day.

1. The ANZACs were all volunteers.
2. April 25, Anzac Day, was the day the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915.
3. 25 April, was officially named ANZAC Day in 1916.
4. The first dawn service on an ANZAC Day was in 1923.
5. AIF is an abbreviation for Australian Imperial Force.