by Peter Hey
‘That’s sweet of you, dear.’
Jane leaned forwards. ‘I haven’t given up, though. I’d like to chat a little more about your more immediate family – aunts, uncles, grandparents, that kind of thing – just to see if there’s anything we’re overlooking. Before we do, though, there’s one idea I’d like to run past you...’
Jane slowly explained her theory about Reuben Dye, Margaret’s maternal grandfather, and his avoidance of military service in World War I.
Margaret looked on the verge of tears. ‘So the three boys who died were my grandfather’s nephews?’
‘Yes, though they were the about the same age as Reuben. Their mother was the eldest in the family, Reuben the youngest,’ clarified Jane.
‘That poor woman. Losing all three of her sons. It’s unimaginable. Can’t life be cruel?’
‘It can. It certainly can. But why do you think your mother didn’t know or tell you about them? They were her first cousins after all.’
‘I remember something about brothers dying in the Great War. But I always thought they were much more distant family.’ Margaret paused briefly. ‘You’ve got to remember there was a rift between my grandfather's siblings. They had two mothers, the two Hannahs. The children of the first felt unloved by the second. That coupled with the gap in ages meant they had little to do with each other.’
‘Do you think your grandfather could have been thought a coward for not fighting in the war? You hear stories of people being given white feathers for not joining up.’
Margaret’s sightless eyes turned towards the window and seemed to stare distantly at the narrowed view beyond. ‘There was a string of five girls before he was born. Reuben means “behold, a son” in Hebrew, you know.’
‘Yes, you put that in your ledger,’ said Jane, slightly confused by the tangential aside and failing to disguise it in her voice.
‘Sorry, dear, my mind isn’t wandering. The point is, he was probably mollycoddled by his mother and sisters as a child. Maybe he wasn’t the bravest, but the army wouldn’t have had him, so it wouldn’t matter.’
‘Why wouldn’t the army want him?’
‘I only vaguely remember my grandfather before he died. But I do know he had a bad limp. He was born with a club foot. A doctor messed around with it when he was a baby, but it just made it worse. He was mobile enough to work down the mine. Just. Of course, coming from where he did, when he did, he had little choice.’
‘But he wasn’t going to pass an army medical,’ said Jane, somewhat defeatedly.
‘No, and my mother once told me that’s why he didn’t move to Yorkshire like his older brothers. Dowley was only a small pit and easier for him to get around.’
‘Why didn’t you mention his club foot in your ledger?’ It was not meant as an accusation. Jane was genuinely intrigued why a seemingly meticulous woman would omit such a defining characteristic.
‘He was always very embarrassed by his limp, apparently. Got horribly bullied as a child. My mother was very close to him and I thought it might please her if I let his disability fade from history. She was never enthusiastic about me doing the family tree, so I felt it was a peace offering.’
‘But no-one’s going to blame an obviously disabled man if he doesn’t enlist,’ restated Jane, for her own ears rather than Margaret’s.
Margaret shook her head in confirmation. ‘It could well have been that his elder half-sister – embittered by the death of her sons – resented the fact that my grandfather stayed at home. But I don’t think my mother could have thought of it as shameful. He couldn’t help it, poor lad, and as I said, she was devoted to him.’
Jane was only slightly disappointed that her one hypothesis had unravelled. She’d never held out much hope and Margaret’s revelation was convincing.
The conversation diverted onto other members of Margaret’s closer family, and she tried to flesh out some of the people based on her own recollections or what she’d heard from others. Jane began using the photo albums to see just how fat Auntie Ruthie had become in later life, or how short Auntie Lizzie’s husband been, and hoping that some clue would emerge from the entertaining but trivial detail. At the bottom of the pile, Jane saw a cover she didn’t recognise and queried it with Margaret.
‘There’s a dark-red one that I haven’t seen before.’
‘Oh yes, dear, I meant to mention that. It’s kept separately with some of my mother’s old things, and Caroline didn’t bring it out last time. It’s my parent’s wedding album.’
Jane’s eyebrows lifted.
Despite the gesture being lost on her, Margaret seemed to read Jane’s thoughts. ‘You’d hope that could tell us a story or two. Trouble is, none of the photographs are labelled. I’m told you can recognise a few of the people – my mum and dad and immediate family – but otherwise it’s full of strangers. Long-dead strangers, at that.’
‘Didn’t your mother ever go through it with you when you were younger?’
‘No, I don’t really know where she used to keep it. On the mantelpiece there was always a framed photo of her and my dad outside the church. I think I assumed that was all you got in the forties – the war hadn’t been over long when they married. After she died, her flat was in such a mess. She was starting to get confused at the end. But we found the album when we were clearing all her things. By then, my eyes were really going downhill and I struggled to make anyone out. My daughter, Jessica, took it home for a while, but she’s not that interested and gave it back to me for safekeeping.’
Jane opened the leather-bound book. It had obviously been produced professionally, with pages interleaved by crisp, semi-transparent tissue paper. The condition was immaculate and Jane lifted each sheet carefully and slowly to avoid creasing or tearing something that had survived a biblical lifespan undamaged. The images themselves were in sharp black and white, printed on very glossy paper and carefully mounted, one to a page. Jane stopped at one group photograph. Somehow it stood out as odd. It seemed to be posing a question that she knew she couldn’t answer. She picked up a different album and flicked through it until she found what she was looking for.
Placing the two open pages side by side, Jane looked up at Margaret and said, ’Your mother had the two sisters, Elizabeth and Ruth – am I right?’
‘That’s right, dear.’
‘And they attended your own wedding and are standing next to your mother in several of the photographs?’
‘Yes. You can’t miss the fact they’re three sisters. There was a very strong family resemblance.’
‘Yes, you can definitely see it. But now I’m looking at your mother’s wedding album. I suspect you know, but your aunts were the bridesmaids. They’re, what, twenty-five years younger, but it’s still unmistakably them. As you’d expect, there’s a photo of just the bride and bridesmaids together, but the picture facing it has another woman with them. She’s roughly the same age, and well, she’s got very similar features. Or maybe it’s the way they seem to be so at ease with each other. Now, why would you photograph the four of them together? Just them and no-one else. It’s almost as if she were a fourth sister.’
The bell and the biro
Jane was back home in Nottingham and was studying the 70-year-old wedding album more closely. She’d been allowed to take it because it promised to offer potential clues, assuming she could identify more of the guests.
There was one photograph Jane kept returning to. The more she looked at it, not only the physical appearance of the mystery fourth woman, but her body language alongside the bride and bridesmaids, the more she was convinced of the closeness of their bond. There was one other visual clue: the woman was wearing a corsage, a floral adornment she shared with the mothers of the bride and groom.
Obviously, she could be a cousin, but Jane had identified most, if not all, of those and none seemed to fit the bill in terms of age. There was also the question of why the woman hadn’t been made a bridesmaid. The answer to that appeared to lie in the
final group picture, which depicted all of the wedding guests standing outside the hotel that had hosted the reception. Ms X, as Jane had christened her, was standing next to a rather dashing-looking man with jet-black hair. They were each holding a young child and leaning into each other. Ms X appeared to be Mrs X, mother of two. On that basis, she would presumably be ineligible for a bridesmaid’s dress at a 1940s wedding.
There was no labelling or annotation in the album, not even a frontispiece to identify the bride and groom. There was, however, a small cardboard pocket inside the rear cover. This held maybe a dozen pieces of confetti, still bright after 70 years, and a delicate little notepad, around two inches tall, with a shiny silver cover and shaped like a bell. When opened, it had only a few leaves of plain white paper onto which people had signed their names. These, then, were the attendees at the wedding, and it was on this document that Jane knew she had to focus her attention.
The names were in columns and written as small as the person could manage in a mixture of blue and black ink. Some were clearly scribed in fountain pen and a few had smudged. The ink hadn’t transferred to the facing page and Jane reasoned that the smudges had occurred because drops of liquid had found their way onto the thin paper. She visualised the silver bell being passed around the guests at the reception and sniffed it for traces of champagne. All she found was the musty smell of old books. The last three pages of signatures appeared to have been written with the same blue pen. Under a magnifying glass, the flow of ink seemed to resemble that of a modern ballpoint. Jane thought the wedding was too early for such a pen, but a quick check on the Internet established that they’d been made for RAF crews in World War II, and after the war, a factory in Reading was producing Biros for sale to the general public.
Having discounted anachronistic forgery, Jane concentrated on the names again. Apart from a single unintelligible scrawl, all the signatures were in the legible copperplate demanded in the classrooms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the married women signed themselves with their husband’s first name or initial, but most used their own forename in full. The few young children at the wedding were recorded in a parent’s hand. About a third of the signatures meant nothing to Jane. She presumed these were friends of the bride and groom or their parents. The other two thirds, however, matched the people Jane had found while researching the family tree. In many cases, she could identify the specific person. In others, she at least recognised the surname as being one which had intermarried with the Dyes.
Eventually, Jane felt confident that she’d eliminated the other possibilities and pinned down the identity of the mystery woman, Mrs X, along with Mr X and their two children. Jane was almost certain they were Mary Smith, James Smith, Lois and Ernie Smith. Jane’s feeling of success was only slightly tempered by the potential challenge of tracing individuals with England’s most common family name.
Having named them, Jane turned her attention and her magnifying glass to their faces. The Dye sisters, the bride and two bridesmaids, took after their father and were not the prettiest of young women. When pictured alongside them, Mary Smith shared the same features, but hers were probably the most attractive. Even so, she was still far from beautiful. Her husband, James Smith, on the other hand, had the looks of a film star. His jet-black hair was Brylcreemed back and a Clark Gable moustache sat over a full mouth and lantern jaw. There were sharp shadows under high cheekbones. Jane was initially drawn to him, but the attraction lessened the more she looked. There was also an arrogance about the man; something in his smile spoke of guile or perhaps shiftiness. It was not a face that inspired trust.
The two young children, one little more than a toddler, had very contrasting appearances. The older, Lois, looked just like her father: jet black hair and, assuming it did not fade with age, a beauty that would break many a young man’s heart in years to come. The boy, Ernie, was plainer to the point of ugliness and had very straight, white-blond hair that stood out as unique amongst the guests at the wedding. Jane knew that children’s hair often darkens as they grow older, but he was a striking incongruity nonetheless.
Jane now had names and faces. She even had a perception of James Smith’s personality, though that it was based on nothing more than intuition, an intuition that had let her down before. The next step was to establish the relationship between Mary Smith and the three sisters she resembled so much. Jane remained convinced they shared some form of close familial bond.
Jane returned to her computer screen. James, Mary and Ernest Smith were very common names, Lois’s less so. The key seemed to be finding links between them and back into Margaret Stothard’s family tree.
Jane’s first step was to look for marriage records uniting Smith with Dye, or Butler, or any of the other surnames she’d found in her previous research. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to fit. There were no James Smiths marrying a potentially suitable Mary.
Jane then turned to the children. She held out great hope with little Lois. It was a name she could only associate with Superman’s girlfriend, Lois Lane, and was surprised to find it going back to at least 1837 in towns as un-American as Swaffham and Dewsbury. That said, there were only a handful of Lois Smiths born in England and Wales in the war years, but none had a mother’s maiden name that Jane recognised. And there were no illegitimate Lois Dyes, Butlers, Bowers, Padgetts or Oakleys.
Disappointed, Jane moved on to Lois’s brother, Ernest. This time there were significantly more matches, but again, nothing that stood out as a possible connection. In particular, there were no Ernest Smiths who might share a mother with a sister called Lois. Jane tried searching for the name Ernie, but that level of official informality appeared unfashionable in the 1940s and led nowhere.
Having drawn a blank with England and Wales, Jane wondered whether the family could have been living in Scotland. It was possible that a pregnant mother might be evacuated north of the border to avoid the bombing in one of England’s industrial cities. The Scottish government kept its records separate and maintained its own family history website. Jane switched her attentions there, but ultimately it, too, proved a dead end. After Scotland, Jane moved to Northern Ireland and then down to the Republic. Again, she drew a blank.
Jane had been searching for hours and her frustration was escalating into dejection. The Smith family seemed to have left no trace of their existence. She started questioning her basic assumptions. Obviously the parents might never have married, but could the surname Smith be a complete invention? Mr and Mrs Smith might be a masquerade adopted when checking into a hotel for an illicit affair, but surely not when you’re at a wedding with people you seem to know well? The apparent ages of the children suggested they were born during or shortly after the war. Foreign travel would be difficult if not impossible at that time, certainly for the social class that attended the nuptials of a Derbyshire coalminer’s daughter. So why couldn’t Jane find a record of Lois’s or Ernie’s birth, legitimate or otherwise, anywhere in the whole of the British Isles? Was adoption proving the barrier? Was Mary not the natural mother to one or both of the children? Would that explain their differing looks?
Jane’s ideas widened to European refugees or to a Private Smith returning to England with the woman and children he’d met on active service abroad, things which Jane knew might be impossible to research.
Ultimately though, her instincts still told her that the mystery woman in the photograph was a local girl and closely related to the bride and her bridesmaids. Jane felt sure there was a link hiding somewhere.
She was tired. It had been a long day and it seemed like she’d made no real progress. She finally conceded that she needed help. Perhaps in anticipation, she’d been working methodically throughout the project and had been typing notes as she went along. She scanned in some extra images and attached the files to a rather rambling email summarising her current thoughts and questions. Feeling guilty, she pressed send and went to bed.
Forensic genealogy
Jane was woken by a bright, warm glow seeping round the curtains of her bedroom window. She had slept in and slept well. She quickly rediscovered the positivity she’d felt when she first saw the mystery woman in the wedding photograph. It was still something tangible, something to work on. Maybe with a new day and a fresh mind, the answers would start to reveal themselves, like daisies opening their petals to the morning sun.
It was then that Jane remembered there was another fresh mind potentially being brought to bear. When she’d sent the email late the previous evening, she’d hoped its recipient would look at it immediately, even work on it overnight, but that had seemed rather unreasonable at the time. Now it seemed totally callous and unfair. Nonetheless, she checked her inbox before she even washed or dressed. There were two unopened items of mail. One was clearly phishing spam asking her to ‘Update your Informations!’ at an online bank where she’d never had an account. The other was the reply from Thompson Ferdinand.
Hi Jane
Work was slow last night, so I was able to look through everything you sent me and, wow! I’m impressed. Analysing photographs and sources other than the normal records is called ‘forensic’ genealogy. It makes it sound rather exciting, a bit like CSI on the TV, don’t you think? But I guess that’s the kind of thing you detectives did all day at Scotland Yard when you were solving murders and stuff.
I was also impressed by how far you extended the Stothard family tree. I only found the one (small) mistake and I don’t think that was really your fault. I also don’t blame you for not finding any trace of the Smith family. It had me foxed for a while, but I guess I’d seen something similar before so it was easier for me.
I’ve updated your file with the details, but here’s a brief summary in chronological order:
1. Mary Smith was born Mary D Butler in 1922. Obviously, I haven’t got my hands on a birth certificate overnight but I wouldn’t be surprised if the D stood for Dye. She was born illegitimately to Mabel Butler before she married Reuben Dye. Given the family resemblance, I think we can assume Reuben was the father. So, Margaret Stothard’s mother was one of four sisters, as you suspected. (I think you missed Mary’s birth because at that time you were concentrating on Derbyshire. The registration district was centred over the border in Nottinghamshire. Searches don’t always pick that up.)