2024 Week 25:Storyteller #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When in 2001 my father in law Jan Stepek had the first of a series of strokes, my husband Martin realised that if Jan died, he would not know much about his past. Martin already knew some basic facts about his father's early life: Jan had been born and raised on a farm in Eastern Poland, he and his family were deported when WW2 broke out, his mother had died during the deportation period and somehow later on he served in the Polish Navy. The bare bones of a story which Martin has only recently fully told in his book "Jan Stepek Part 1 : Gulag to Glasgow".

So... Martin determined that if his father recovered sufficiently, he would ask him to share the whole story of his early life. Thankfully this was the case. And what a story emerged!

As well as interviewing his father, Martin interviewed and filmed his father's two sisters who had also been deported. This meant he had three different perspectives. Over and above this, he researched online and discovered various key points of information which even the three Stepek siblings either didn't know or remember. These included the location of the labour camp to which they had been deported, background information from others whose family members had also been deported, military records from Iran of the medical reports of the conditions of the Polish refugees as they arrived from the Soviet Union. Amongst other documentation from other sources he obtained the dates of their arrival and departure from the camp, a photograph of the headstone of Jan's mother, Janina, buried in Tehran and Jan's whole military record after he joined the Polish Navy in 1943. This research was done over a period of 22 years and finally published in book form earlier this year.

While researching, Martin also discovered a lot about Jan's father, Wladyslaw Stepek, who had been politically active in seeking the resumption of Polish independence, but that's another story waiting to be told!

Reviews of the book have included many references to Martin as a great storyteller. He is proud to have been able to connect all the dots and write the story of his father so that Jan's extended family, his friends and colleagues in Scotland and the wider Polish diaspora, whose families experienced similar odysseys, can know the full story behind the man who was Jan Stepek, father, grandfather, successful businessman and philanthropist.

Martin's book is available to buy on Amazon.

Comments

Week 50: You wouldn't believe it! #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

I have already written about my 3 x great uncle, James McAra, who was sentenced to deportation at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1811. His crime had been to attack his brother, my 3 x great grandfather, Alexander, with an iron bar during an argument, with Alexander being badly hurt and dying a few days later. James was an iron worker by trade in Scotland and continued this trade in the small town of Sorell in Tasmania. We cannot know much about the life he led in Sorell, but he is mentioned in a variety of documents. For example we know he was given a Free Pardon by the Governor of Tasmania and New South Wales in 1836. He also acquired some land in 1839, which, in his Will, he left to daughters of a friend. We know his affection for 'drink', which had led to the fatal fight back in Scotland, never left him as 'excessive drinking' was given as cause of death on his death certificate. However his tombstone bears witness to the fact he was well-liked and a 'good and h

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 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

Roots, shoots and stories

Search This Blog