2025 Week 9: Family secret #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My husband Martin has already published a book about his father's life before he came to Scotland in 1946 (Jan Stepek: Gulag to Glasgow ).He is now writing a sequel to that book detailing his life in Scotland as a well known businessman and father to ten children.

Martin was therefore fortunate in that he had his many siblings to ask for memories and information about his dad. Lots of conversations took place that filled gaps in the story of his dad's life as the siblings each recalled personal and shared memories of a father who had been through so much.

Martin's eldest brother John was living in Portugal and so their 'conversations' took place over e-mail. John was also the one with the most knowledge about their father for two reasons. One, he was the eldest and two, he was the successor to his father as managing director of the family business and so dealt with him on a daily basis.

In one of these e-mails early in 2023, John had written, "I don't know if this is common knowledge, but dad was involved with Special Branch for a long time prior to the collapse of Communism. He would regularly get calls in the office .... from an inspector or some such rank. He and dad would meet under Bothwell Bridge. Dad basically supplied him with information about the Polish Government's thinking, gleaned from his meetings with the Ambassador and other officials, both in the UK and Poland."

This was news to Martin! His dad was not quite a spy but .......there were other actual spies in his family tree!

During the Spanish Civil War, Gustav Konopnicki, Martin's great uncle was in the Polish Intelligence Service. But that's another story!

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...

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...

Roots, shoots and stories

Search This Blog