NONE of today's descendants of Raymond Halliday ever knew him.

There are no tales echoing down the years about him, no clue about what he was like. But, still, their pride in him burns fiercely.

For their grandfather, Lance Corporal Raymond Halliday, died not only fighting for Britain but against Nazism in the epic, famous allied defeat in the Battle for Arnhem in Holland in1944.

The Stockton father of at least three children was just 26-years-old. Just another dead soldier in the chaos of war and as the British Army began a mass retreat his body was put in an unmarked grave.

Or unmarked until now, anyway.

The Royal Netherlands Army's dedicated Recovery and Identification team, putting names to the allied war dead for decades, has managed to identify Lance Corporal Halliday's body using exhumation reports. The young soldier's body was relatively easy to identify from his dental records as he had a full set of dentures.

His corpse identified, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) began the task of finding his descendants and a national publicity campaign was launched, Lance Corporal Halliday's story even being highlighted by ITV news.

It emerged that the solider, an ICI worker before the war, had actively enlisted, joining the Border Regiment in April 1940. He was shot in a trench at Oosterbeek in the Netherlands on September 17, the last day of the massive, controversial and failed offensive dubbed Operation Market Garden which involved parachuting 30,000 troops into Holland to attempt to capture bridges and the Dutch canal network.

No more details were known, but eventually his Stockton family was found. Complete strangers who read the MOD appeal and began the process of finding sisters, Joanne Pritchard and Julie Halliday on Facebook. A private investigator tracked down their cousin, Glen Brocklesby.

"I absolutely stunned," said Mr Brocklesby. "I didn't know anything about my granddad and didn't think it would affect me. But it has. It is not only stunning but it makes you proud. It is just sad that none of our parents are here to see it."

It's a sentiment echoed by Mrs Pritchard and Mrs Halliday. Their father, also Ray, was only two when his own father died. Many years later, in the 1970s, the younger Ray Halliday, manager of Billingham Town FC who discovered Gary Pallister, worked in Holland. Now a young father himself, he began a quest to find the resting place of the dad he never knew and tried hard but, of course, could not find it.

"Dad never really said much about his father," said Mrs Pritchard, "but we will go to the grave dedication ceremony in September and stand where we know our dad would have been. He would have given anything to be there." Mrs Halliday explains that she had never even seen a photograph of her grandfather until a few days ago. "But we are so, so proud," she explained.

The family share small pieces of information and more of a picture begins to emerge of their grandfather. He was born somewhere in County Durham (the MOD say Durham itself but the family suspect somewhere nearer Stockton). He married Lillian aged just 16. He had at least three children, Patricia, Val and Ray, now all deceased, and there may have been a fourth, older child.

His granddaughter, Mrs Pritchard, explains her family stumbled across the ICI War Memorial for its fallen workers in old Billingham, near their home, about five or six years ago. Halliday, R was etched on that memorial and her own children wrote about it for a school project. It was the nearest her family had ever got to their grandfather and great-grandfather.

"Now we will all, the whole family, altogether, go to Holland and remember him," she said, "remember him with a lot of pride."