2025 Week 7: Letters and diaries

Although we have no historic diaries in the family, we are in possession of letters sent by Janina Stepek, my husband's grandmother, from the slave labour camp in Siberia, where she and her children had been taken by the Soviet Red Army from their home in Poland in 1940.

Dated 22 May 1940, Janina wrote the following to her husband, Wladyslaw, two months after they had arrived in the labour camp:

" Henrik (Janina's brother) wrote from Lwow. He thought you'd have received a letter from him by now explaining what happened to us. We are all alive, but I'm already down to 50 kilograms (Janina had lost a third of her weight in three months). We were taken away on the tenth of February and arrived at this camp on the tenth of March. We are 450 kilometres from Archangel. I can't write about everything as you can imagine the situation here. How are you? I hope you are coping."

We have another letter Janina sent to her husband in the August of the same year:

"Oh my dearest! We received your letter of seventh of July luckily. All of us are still alive. There are now lots of berries and mushrooms growing, so we are eating them and some we are selling. Somehow we are managing but what will winter make of us? Will we still be alive after that? All of us are barefoot and the winter lasts eight months and starts in two months time. "

Just reading that aloud to me makes Martin very emotional. It is awful to read what Janina, her two daughters and Martin's dad were going through, written in her own hand in her own words. The grandmother he never knew and her children, who must have carried these memories and trauma throughout their lives.

Martin has told the full tragic story of his family history in relation to both World Wars in his book about his father Gulag to Glasgow

Comments

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 19: Preserve #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

A few years ago, I came into the possession of a family bible. It was the family bible of my paternal grandparents, John McAra and Christina Walker. Until her death in 2018, the bible had been in the hands of my Aunt Inez, widow of my Uncle Will McAra. When I started enquiring as to its whereabouts, I found that it was her grandson, John, who now had it. John himself had no real interest in it at all, so he was quite happy to hand it over to me. However, it was, to say the least, in a bit of a state. The front cover was completely detached and there were many loose pages as the spine of the book was also damaged and detached. I had no choice but to take it to a book repairer in Glasgow, where it was repaired as best it could be. The bible itself had been originally published in Glasgow in the late 19th century. In Victorian times it was common for Christian families to have such a large bible in which they could record events such as births, marriages and deaths. The one I have al...

2025 Week 26 : Favourite name #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

As well as researching my own family, one of the other trees I have spent a lot of time on is that of my daughter-in-law, Lucy. Whereas my heritage is Scots and Irish, Lucy's is English and therefore some of the names I came across were quite different to those found in my own tree. One of my first favourites was a Francis Badger who appeared in the 1851 census for England! He wasn't actually a relative, but an apprentice to Lucy's 3 x great grandfather and who also lodged with the family. I did wonder how that surname came about - did the original Badger have a funnily shaped face? or perhaps a white streak through his hair?? Or was he just an annoying person?? I'll never know, but it was fun to find him! Francis Badger's entry at the bottom in the 1851 census for England. Source: Ancestry.co.uk However, my all time favourite name - and character - from Lucy's tree is a man named Golden Bridge ! He is Lucy's 5x great grandfather and he was born in Essex...

Roots, shoots and stories

Search This Blog