Finding Family

Seems like I turn over a new leaf every so often, and there - in hiding - is a new relative. Most of them previously unknown and undiscovered by immediate family. My son gives me a bad time about turning up with all these new people.

My latest - now follow along - is the daughter of the half-sister of my husband's mother's younger sister's first husband's first wife... not exactly a close blood relative, but "related" in some sense of the word - I call them Kissing Cousins ("KC") when they turn up.

The background: KC's mother and father had arranged to meet with half-sister "Nan" and her husband Peter, an RAF pilot, in the summer of 1945 at Bath, England. They had seen each other recently in London. Nan and Peter never showed up. They never heard from Nan again, but kept looking. It was wartime... it was England... Mary and husband were trying to get all the ducks in a row to emigrate to the States... Nan may have gone to Nairobi... she and Peter divorced...

Current Status: Last year - 60 years later - just months after her mother Mary's death, the "KC" found some true cousins - children of Nan and Peter. She has talked with them by phone and corresponded. It is a crusade for KC to find her missing aunt, but it is spectacular fountain of information for Peter's kids - both from his marriage to Mary and his next marriage to Kay, which produced four children. Peter died when the youngest was just 3 years old. The children knew very little of him. And now this stranger has popped into their lives with names of grandparents and cousins and aunts.

Little rumors of Nan's existence pop up in family stories. Someone recalls seeing her in a grocery store in Iringa, Tanganyika Territories after the divorce... Someone says she was married again, but he might not have bothered to divorce the prior wife... Someone thinks she may have had more children... There are clues, but no body.

I find it incredible that no one bothered to document anything in the family. I'm compulsive - it must be on paper somewhere. How could they not ask their mother about details??? and then remember them??? But they didn't. They apparently didn't even know for sure if their dad was in the Army or the RAF, let alone where they lived and what happened to their half-siblings' mother. And now Kay is dead also. How sad. Perhaps the KC will eventually put the puzzle pieces together and at least be able to say where Nan died. Maybe not.

Nan and Peter were married in the UK, Kay and Peter in Africa; children were born in the UK and in Africa and again in the UK, some settled in Canada and the U.S. The challenges in finding records at all has been time consuming and frustrating. None of the families are close and clingy - barely to the Christmas card stage - so communication has been difficult.

I pushed my husband's family into some documentation of their parents' early lives - fascinating lives in Poland, Russia, Iran, Palestine, East Africa and finally the UK, Canada, the US and Australia. Mum and Kay had been closed-mouthed about the details - the War and its effects was still painful to talk of, even after all these years. The third survivor of the six children died when he was in his 50s. But the children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren had no idea of what a victory it was for any of them to have survived, until we wrote up some of those stories.