Roots, shoots and stories

So .... in the future one of your descendants wants to delve into their family history. Let's imagine they are really good at tracing records such as birth, marriage, deaths and censuses. They find you - but what do they really know about you, apart from those crucial dates, places and your job? (Of course, we don't know how far your imprint on today's social media will transfer through the generations, so they might very well find out what you had for lunch and where yesterday, but we don't know that for certain.) There may well be some older relative who remembers you and you may get lucky if they knew you well enough to tell them what kind of a person you were and some stories about you. But most people will likely remain unknown, existing as a name and relevant dates. That's quite sad really, as everyone has their story to tell. A story that I have been luckily enough to piece together, and, which I have written about before, is that of my 3 x great granduncle, ...

 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: ...

My father-in-law Jan Stepek, along with his mother and two sisters spent two years in a Soviet labour camp and as refugees during WW2.  Amazingly, despite this, they were able to correspond to family back in Poland. Often these letters were censored or just not delivered, but some still got through. The Red Cross was responsible for delivering letters and parcels, something that still happens in parts of the world to this day which people are unaware of.  After the war, one of the sisters, Danuta, was the first to return to Poland, some 24 years after she had been deported to the camps. There she met her father's two sisters for the first time. After an emotional reunion and conversation one of the aunts left the room and returned with a box. In it was a collection of photographs, documents and some of the letters which had got through to Poland from the labour camps. This was the first time Danuta has seen an image of her parents for over a quarter of a century. Most poignant...

 When I first visited Cramond Kirk and its churchyard a few years ago in search of my McAra ancestors, I came across a large gravestone, listing some family members and their dates and places of death, two of whom I can associate with the topic of 'Boats'.  The stone itself was erected many years after the deaths of the people listed and some of the dates were definitely inaccurate. James McAra, the first name on the stone was certainly not dead on the stated date - he was, in fact, living in Tasmania having been deported for the accidental killing of his brother, my 3 x great grandfather (More details about that are given here :  James McAra  ). However, it was not the dates that drew my attention, it was one of the places mentioned as place of death. James' son, Archibald McAra, was listed as dying in Valparaiso, Chile! McAra gravestone in Cramond Churchyard. Inscription unfortunately not too clear. That came as quite a surprise. When his father James had been conv...

 At 2 a.m. on the 10th of February 1940, Janina Stepek and her three children, Jan, Zosia and Danka were woken up by loud knocking at the door of their home in Eastern Poland. It was the Soviet Red Army and Ukrainian Militia, the Soviets having invaded Poland some five months earlier. The family were ordered to pack what they could and be ready to leave within thirty minutes. One officer, in an act of kindness, told Janina to pack as much as they could for cold weather. They were taken by cart to the nearest train station, along with the entire population of the village. There they discovered that the inhabitants of many villages had been similarly forced to leave their homes. After several hours in the freezing cold, they were bundled on to cattle trains. Each wagon took fifty people, crammed together. There was no toilet, there was a stove in the centre of the carriage and there were some shelves which could be used as beds for some. The doors slid shut and locked everyone in, le...

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...

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...

Nowadays, the word 'travel'  conjures up pictures of holidays, of good times spent with those we care about. In past times, for our ancestors, travel would have meant something very different - a search for work in a different part of the country or a start of a new life in a far away place. For others, however, travel was something they undertook to save their very lives. It is the 11th September 1941. This morning, Janina Stepek (38) and her three children, Jan (19), Zofia (16) and Maria Danuta (14) make a momentous decision. Some weeks previously the family and the other prisoners in the Charytonowo Labour Camp in northern Russia had been informed that they were now free to leave, due to the German invasion of Russia. So today, the youngest child is now well enough to undertake the journey. They have to head south - north leads to the Arctic, west leads to the frontline and east is the vast wastelands of Siberia. They have also been told that Polish officials have been permi...

Sometimes when you find yourself in the very worst of circumstances, it is the actions of other people which can make all the difference. It is the 6th of December 1941. In a cattle train on the outskirts of Moscow are a hundred or so Polish refugees. They have all been recently released from Soviet labour camps and are trying to find their way to safety. Among these people are my husband's grandmother and her three children. They haven't eaten for days and death from starvation is near. The train is stuck in a railway siding due to heavy snow on the tracks. Hours pass by. Then they hear the sound of another train approaching. It also grinds to a halt because of the snow. It is full of Russian civilians fleeing the German advance which is nearing Moscow. The hungry Poles leave their train to beg for some food from the Russian passengers. But Martin's grandmother, Janina, is too near starvation to stand let alone get out of the cattle train. So her younger daughter Danuta st...

 Maria Danuta Stepek (known as Danka) was born in 1927 in Maczkowce, Poland. She was the youngest of three children of Wladyslaw and Janina Stepek, my husband's grandparents. She had a happy childhood on her parents' farm until the outbreak of war in September 1939. When the Soviet Union invaded from the east, her father Wladyslaw was quickly informed that he was on a list of those persons to be arrested and executed. He fled into hiding with the Resistance and this was the last time she saw him. Four months later, 12 year old Danka, her sister Zofia (14), her brother Jan (17) and her mother were deported to northern Russia near the Arctic Circle. The journey took three weeks by cattle train and ended at a political labour camp where they lived and worked for the next eighteen months. All her family members, including Danka herself, fell ill in the camp and all were malnourished. Her mother lost 4 stones in weight. On their release in October 1941, they had to make their own wa...

My husband's paternal grandfather, Wladyslaw Stepek, was born in 1893 in Poland, at a time when that area of Poland was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When WW1 broke out in 1914, he was conscripted into the Austrian Army. We knew he had been a POW, taken prisoner sometime in 1915 and later released. In 2017, Martin wondered if there would be any records held somewhere in Austria which could give us any more information, given that Wladyslaw had served in the Austrian Army. So, he dictated a letter to me in English, which I translated into German, and we sent it off to the Austrian State Archives. We thought there was only a slim chance of anything coming from this, but we waited on a reply. A couple of weeks later, in came the reply. They would search their archives for a fee of 45 Euros for the 30 minutes work they believed it would entail. All we had to do was agree to this and wait. They estimated we would hear if they had found anything or not within the next eight weeks....

Looking at my own family tree, I can find multiple ancestors who lost one or more children at a young age. That was obviously the norm in past centuries, but despite it being a common occurrence, I expect the parents' grief would have been just as deep. My paternal grandparents lost their first three children - John at age 8 from 'Convulsions due to congestion of the brain' ( nowadays this would be a seizure/stroke),  Jeannie at 8 months from 'enteritis' and George at age 1 from measles, while my maternal grandparents lost a son James aged 1, from heart failure. My great great grandmother Mary Boag died from complications of childbirth, leaving three children under the age of 10 - the new baby son dying one day before she did. Again this was not unusual. When I compare the ages of deaths of my direct ancestors, I think I am remarkably lucky. The graphic above is from www.dnapainter.com where their ancestral tree feature allows you to make age at death comparisons. T...

Following on from the last topic of ‘Social Media’, I am going to continue with the story from 1811 of James McAra, my 3 x great uncle. He was found guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh of the culpable homicide of his brother, Alexander, my 3 x great grandfather, and was’ banished for life’. In other words, he was deported to Australia. A real outcast. You might think that would be the end of his story as far as my research was concerned. You would be wrong. There were a multitude of records kept on prisoners sent away. Here are a few of them:  Australian Convict Transportation Registry UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books NSW and Tasmania, Australia, Convict Musters NSW Australian Convict Indents NSW Australian Colonial Secretarys' Papers NSW Australian Convict Register of Conditional and Absolute Pardons Tasmania, Australia, Deeds of Land Grants    From those, a story started to emerge. Convicted in January 1811 to be sent to Van Dieman’s Land, James was impri...