The challenge of finding genes that fit

Meet the grandparents:

My Grandparents, circa 1917

I never met my grandfather; he was held by the Japanese in an internment camp in China and died there in 1944, 12 years before I was born. It’s a long and complicated story, but my grandfather was South African by birth and went over to England as a young man – I presume to complete his studies as an architect – and then the first World War interrupted everyone’s lives and he joined up in England to fight. I don’t actually know at what stage he met my grandmother, but they married in Oxford in 1917 and, at the end of the war, they both went off to China to live where he practised as a well respected architect, with many of his buildings still in existence there today.

I doubt my grandmother would have known it at the time she first stepped on board the ship that was taking them to Shanghai, but she would have been just a few weeks pregnant with my mother – who was born 6 months after their arrival. But it seems the marriage was not to be a happy one. Whilst I have no details, and my mother has no knowledge or real memory of what took place, it sounded like these two individuals were poles apart in their attitudes and expectations. More of that at some other time, but in 1928 my grandmother went back to England, taking her 8 year old daughter with her, neither ever to see my grandfather again. They divorced (and you’ll appreciate just how rare it was for couples to divorce back in the 1920s) and my grandmother never remarried. And neither was there any further knowledge of what had become of my grandfather.

This year, after helping Mr Knitterly Notions trace some previously unknown lines of his own family, I decided that the time had come to investigate my own past. My mother had made an attempt some years ago, but without the advantages of the internet and email, it was a long, hard slog that bore disappointing results.

My chase first led me to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who had detailed my Grandfather’s death whilst in captivity, but it also gave me the next clue in my search: the name of his second wife. Then I went looking for information about the camp that the Japanese had secured them in when they invaded China and, with the benefit of the internet, I discovered a website dedicated to those who had been interned in that particular camp. Reading the documents, the diaries, seeing the photographs and the drawings done by those who were there was an extraordinary experience, and it was here that I learned that my grandfather had gone on to have 3 more daughters (half-sisters to my mother), all of whom were imprisoned with he and his second wife.

I then reached the stage where I had made contact with a fellow in England who was also in that camp as a young boy. He later became heavily involved with the Far East Internees Association and, as such, had access to many documents that would give me some much needed clues about my grandfathers origins. But, perhaps more exciting, was that he is currently in contact the daughters of my grandfather’s second marriage. The eldest – who he knew best – is now 73, and he was offering to write to her on my behalf to see whether she would be interested in making contact.

It was some weeks later, on New Years Eve, that he emailed me to say that he had been in touch with D and unfortunately “there was no way she wanted to know anything about this”. I was utterly deflated – I’d felt this might be the only way I could fill in some of the details surrounding my grandfathers little known past. BUT, he went on to say, he had since been contacted by one of the other daughters, and she was VERY interested. So he’d forwarded her all my email correspondance to him, and said that if I didn’t hear anything back from her, then he could only give me whatever information was in the public domain.

In the meantime, I continued unearthing obscure records like some master sleuth! A tiny fragment of information that presented itself during a Google Books search led me to discover an extract from Who’s Who of China 1925 that indicated there was a listing included for my grandfather. One of just 2 places named where that book is held? The Australian National Library in Canberra! By the next weekend I was there in Canberra with the book in my hand – and his entry included his place of birth and father’s name, as well as the date of his first arrival in China. And when I came back from Canberra, what should be waiting for me but emails, two very excited and welcoming emails, from two of the 3 sisters (my half-aunts!) no less.

It’s all been a bit overwhelming since then……reams of information passing between here, the US and England. They are just as keen to know about WGP as I – it wasn’t until 1983 that they first became aware that their father had even been married before; their mother had harboured that information right through the decades. We all respect that their eldest sister wants to know nothing about this – but I do think it’s rather sad that there’s bitterness and divisions evident after all this time. Many photographs of my grandfather and relatives that I hadn’t even known of until these last few weeks have now been exchanged. They even have one from the very same sitting that my photo (above) came from, complete with the bulldog but without my grandmother, his first wife, beside him!

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