During World War II, my great-granddad, George Arthur Roberts, was awarded for his bravery fighting fires night after night.

Thanks to him and his fellow volunteers, there was a city to wake up to.

This remembrance, discover your family's wartime story free with ancestry.

Until the 13th of November, enjoy unlimited free searches of all global wartime records.

Visit ancestry and register with just your name and email

to start discovering today.

Offer ends the 13th of November. It was a different time.

You have to keep reminding yourself of that in order to make sense of the terrible things that happened.

During the 1960s there was still this naive sense that bad things like this didn't occur.

Not in broad daylight and certainly not to little children.

It was a real scorcher that day in South Australia near Adelaide.

Thermometers read as high as 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

It was January 26, 1966, Australia Day, and the three Beaumont children, Jane, Arna, and Grant,

age 9, 7, and 4, age 9, 7 and 4, respectively, asked their mother Nancy if they could take the bus

to Glenelg Beach, unsupervised.

Today such actions might seem outright neglectful, but the children had made that five-minute bus ride many times before without incident.

Just the day before, for example, their father had dropped them off at the same beach before heading off on what was supposed to be a three-day business trip to Snowden.

And like I said, back then it was a different time.

After everything that happened, and news broke out about the children's disappearance,

a major paradigm shift spread all over Australia.

Practically overnight, parents began keeping a more watchful eye on their children

and cast a more suspicious gaze on every stranger. But by then it was far too late for the Beaumont children.

...