Grandpa was famous for only ever telling funny stories about the war but then at night we'd hear him suffering the most terrible nightmares.

What of our returned great-uncle whose behaviour was so wild and tragic? Was it what happened on Gallipoli that did that to him or was it something else, perhaps something already there in his and perhaps in his whole families' personality?

National Archives of Australia curator Anne-Marie Condé believes an Archives initiative just under way will prove to be a godsend for many family researchers investigating their families' returned men. Archives has announced that to mark the centenary of World War I, it has begun to digitise (make available to all, online) World War I repatriation records. They document the medical care, welfare services and pensions provided by the Repatriation Department – now known as the Department of Veterans' Affairs. They also reveal lots of the dramas of the troubled men and their families dealing with health and repatriation bureaucracies.

We know that the Great War had its official ending on the dot of the 11th hour of the 11th day of November 1918 ("Huns Quit! War Is Over!" newspaper headlines rejoiced).

But for many Anzacs, Archives is reminding us, the horrors of war didn't end then or after they had returned home. Persistent health problems – physical and mental – often meant unemployment, disability, pain and, if things became unbearable, suicide.

Condé explains that the official figure for the number of men who came home with orthodox wounds (to be met on the quay, as in our picture, by cars to take them away for care) is 155,000. But by 1938, she further explains, there were 257,000 returned Great War veterans being assisted by war pensions, pointing to how much distress the veterans, including the ostensibly unwounded ones, were by then displaying.

She points out that while family historians have for some time now had online access to men's war records, these records, though priceless, tend to be plain and factual and shed little light on what became of the returned men. She gives, as an example of the kind of mystery the repatriation records may help with, the (true) story from one man's file of a family who tried in vain to get authorities to disclose whether their returned man's behavioural horrors had been caused by experiences on Gallipoli or had some other cause.

Archives director-general David Fricker believes that "these records really show the ongoing impact of the war on individuals, their families and the nation as a whole ... they will make a major contribution to social history research in Australia."

Archives has more than 600,000 World War I repatriation records, necessitating their staged digitisation.

Fricker says that "this [first] stage aims to digitise 5000 of these repatriation records, notably of the men and women who left Australia from Albany in November 1914 as part of the first convoy, and returned home again. More than 2300 have already been digitised and are available online by searching under the person's name or service number."

Further details of the records can be found on the Archives' Discovering Anzacs website http://discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au/

And while on harrowing and tragic subjects (we will try to be a little more cheerful tomorrow) we have had many, diverse reactions to last Wednesday's woody column that looked at the debate about the species of tree to line the light rail route.

In that item, going off at a timber tangent, we discussed Australian arborophobia, the widespread conviction that Australian trees are deadly "widowmakers" poised to fall on those they take a dislike to.

We suspected that some of this arborophobia must be due to that face-ashening, once-read-never-forgotten passage of Ethel Tuner's Seven Little Australians. Never out of print in more than 100 years, millions of Australians have read it and been horrified by the way that dear, blameless Judy is fatally crushed by a falling (ringbarked and dead) bush Goliath of a tree.

Simon Butt, captain of the Gungahlin Brigade of the ACT Rural Fire Service, responds that "after reading your article around trees and people having a morbid fear of trees I thought I might share a different perspective".

"As a rural (bush) firefighter of 15 or so years the term 'widowmaker' was one of the very first things I was taught. This was simply a matter of life or death. During a fire trees become the biggest killer of firefighters. A small amount of research would have shown [you] that in the past five years at least five Australian firefighters have died due to being stuck by falling trees or limbs at bushfires.

"The term 'widowmaker' after time lost most of its shock factor and became somewhat of a throwaway line. This was until I attended the funeral of a firefighter struck by a tree and watched his widow and children drive past. A very confronting sight and one that has stayed with me to this day.

"I love the Australian bush and will continue to be a rural firefighter for as long as I can. I will, however, always have a healthy respect for trees at all times, not just during fires. Our bush landscape requires us not to take it for granted."