Genealogy Chat

So how do I make a stubborn old man talk to me???
the only time I have ever heard him talk about it was with my Aunts husband who was also Polish. Unfortunately I was too young and don't remember any of it!!!

Unlike my mother, who seems to be leading me up the garden path with her info LOL

My husband grandparents had three children the first a boy they lost at 2 months in 1903 and then my MIL was born in 1905 ,Her only sister was born in 1909 and neither are with the parents on the 1911 census ,I know Mum was sent to Ireland to the paternal grandparents at around 4 years of age and the baby was with Nanas parents,Why cos Grandad and Nana could only afford to rent two rooms and no children were allowed,Both parents worked so the children were sent to family to be looked after,Mum was sent away before her sister was born so there was always sibling rivalry cos the baby went home before she did

Ooo Shirley how interesting :)
I wish I could find that kind of detail!!

You cant! Some things are best left unsaid, it is obviousely very painful for him, and I suspect many thousand of people who suffered through the war years feel the same.

My grandfather was in WW1 at France and Mesopotamia with the Black Watch...........most things we found out after he died, he never talked about it to my dad, I think it was just too traumatic for him......he was wounded twice..........recovered then sent back to fight, it was five years nearly before he came back to Scotland apart from one short leave, and when he did come home to his wife and 4 year old son, she had given birth to a new baby by another man!
Ann

Julie
i only know cos my MIL ,a lovely lady, told me about living in Ireland with her gran and going to school without shoes, which where only worn on Sundays to go to mass. I knew Nana & Grandad too although Grandad died in 1958 just a day before our daughter was born. Nana was open about why she married at 18 to get away from home cos her parents kept having children and she as the eldest was the unpaid nursemaid ,AND, she was too emotionally drained cos so many of the babies they had & she had to look after died in their early months Not her fault i hasten to add as they lived in poor circumstances and children succumbed to various illnesses like fits and bronchitis etc.

I have seen on one of the new Counties on-line on the Irish 1911 census two little girls "adopted" by different families in the same area, both girls were born in England.Both girls had same surname, but different from both families names.
Adoptions did not start in Ireland until 1944, but children could be privately adopted before that.

Lily

Maybe there wasn't a 1941 census, but there certainly was a national registration around that time. How else would you get a ration book, eh?

For Julie,
Maybe your Dad would be able to write some things down, even in Polish, rather than talk face to face. Mum was very sparing with her family stories and said the same one or two things about her experiences in London in the Blitz when asked. But in her final years she did a memory book for my Dad when he turned 80, and after the success of that started to gather things together for one for herself. When she suddenly died there was actually quite a lot of information we children had never heard her talk about tucked away in several envelopes, including a partial family tree which has proved to be quite correct. She had started writing letters to cousins and old neighbours and asked questions about her own family to satisfy her own curiosity I think. She was the youngest of a youngest, her cousins were more like aunts and uncles and she never really knew them either. No wonder she emigrated after the war.
Good luck, don't give up, there may be a way..... Hz