Right page, right time
Reading Janet Few’s article (FT February), I thought you might like to hear how I managed to trace my father’s family tree back to 1580 (before the great invention of the Internet) and which involved an edition of Family Tree Magazine from 1988!
I started my family tree quest on the birth of my eldest son Mathew. My father died young of lung cancer aged 44 in 1962 (in Canada, emigrated from UK in 1947); I was 5 years old when he died. His ashes were sent back to the UK and were interred in his parents’ grave. My mother was also interred in the same grave 4 years ago when she died at the age of 93. She was 37 when my father died and never remarried.
They had both been through WW2, my father was a Welsh Guardsman who spent the entire time of WW2 a Prisoner of War in Poland in Stalag VIIIB camp and was subjected to the 1,000 mile march across Europe prior to liberation. They were married in December 1945 and went to Canada in 1947 under the ‘Drew Scheme’.*
My mother brought me back to my maternal grandparents to live in the UK in 1963 as she had no other family in Canada and although I got to meet and see my father’s siblings, both
