Skip to main content

Week 11: Lucky #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 It is the year 1916. Wladyslaw Stepek, my husband's grandfather, is a prisoner of war in a Russian camp. He contracts tuberculosis and the prison guards decide he needs to be operated on. During the operation, half of one lung is removed and, while he is recovering, he plays card games with his captors. 

At one such game he wins money from them, but they can't afford to pay him. He tells them "Gentlemen,I don't want your money, I want my freedom." Surprisingly they agree to see what they can do about that and they come up with a plan.

One of the other prisoners is due to be hanged for attempting to escape. The prison guards tell the prisoner who is due to be hanged that they will spare his life and send him to Siberia instead for 15 years - under one condition. He must change his name to Wladyslaw Stepek!

This, however, causes a problem for the guards as they need to have a hanged body. So they decide that they will 'hang' the body of another prisoner, who has died earlier of natural causes in his cell. This, of course, causes yet another problem - they have to bury the 'person' who died in the cell. So, they fill a coffin with rocks and bury that instead.

So ... 'Wladyslaw Stepek' (not Martin's grandfather) goes off to Siberia, a coffin without a body is buried and an already dead prisoner is hanged.  This leaves the real Wladyslaw Stepek (Martin's grandfather) free to leave the camp and make his way home!

That was one LUCKY card game. And Wladyslaw is one LUCKY man.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

 When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...

2024 Week 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar,  butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes.  She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f...

2024: Week 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however,  the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...