HE was forever young, my great uncle. His friendly face looked at me from a silver picture frame on my nan's mantlepiece as I was growing up.

Had Reg Bray lived, there may well have been another tribe of my cousins growing up in Kent.

But Reg didnn't have long to live when that photograph was taken. His life was snuffed out before it had barely begun in "The Great War".

My grandmother always spoke fondly of her brother. But I didn't pay much attention and, for me, Reg was the family's unknown soldier.

However, thanks to some basic detective work and the Internet, I found myself placing a flower on his grave in a deserted, windswept war cemetery in Belgium.

Remembering one of the millions who fell in that dreadful war to end all wars was, despite the years, an intensely moving occasion.

Reg was my mother's mother's brother. His parents, John and Beatrice Bray, lived in Skinner Street, Chatham. Until recently I could recall being told only two things about him. As a boy, he once sent a bowl of uncooked rice pudding crashing to the kitchen floor and was consequently remembered as always getting into mischief. It was one of my nan's stories about her brother.

Another was how his death broke his mother's heart.

The family believed that the shock of being told he had been killed in action triggered the heart problems which quickly turned Beatrice into an invalid and eventually killed her.

That was about it. Not much of an obituary for one who fell on Flanders Field one of the eight million victims of the First World War. So I did a little bit of family history research and started to learn more about great uncle Reg.

First stop was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. Its search engine invites you to put in any or some information you may have from surname, initials, service, theatre of war, date of death and nationality.

Bray R, Great War, UK, threw up a short list of names with only one probability. Within a few minutes I'd found him. Trooper Bray was in the Household Battalion, a Household Cavalry infantry unit set up during the war and disbanded at the end of it.

Reg died on Sunday, October 14, 1917, and is buried at Solferino Farm Cemetery just a few kilometres north-west of Ieper in Belgium. Reg would have known it as Ypres or, more probably, Wipers.

He was 24. Back home in Chatham he left a wife, Florence. They had no children. I now know that Reg was born in Dover and lived with his parents in Bryant Street, Chatham, before moving to Skinner Street.

Why this Man of Kent came to be in the Household Battalion and where he served I don't know. His military records were destroyed in the London Blitz, along with a million others.

But he died just after Passchendaele, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, so he could have died of wounds, drowned in the liquid mud or been gassed. He could have been caught by a stray shell while resting after the battle.

I cut a yellow rose from a bush grafted from one grown by Reg's sister, and now in my garden, and went to Belgium to pay my respects.

Solferino Farm is one of so many Commonwealth war graves in between the neat and tidy villages in the Ieper area. Stark white tombstones stand to attention in row after endless row.

As I read the simple inscription on Reg's stone it occurred to me that I was probably the first member of the family to visit his grave since he was buried.

It may have been nearly 90 years ago, but I remember him.