Researching for friends

I’ve been working on my family tree for 15 years or so and just love doing it. So, whenever I get the chance, I will do research for friends. Not very often have I come up with anything particularly exciting , including my own family tree, but recently I came across the following.

I’m a Yorkshireman now living on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada and offered to help a Canadian friend who was working on his family history. I found a 1st cousin 2 x removed, William Thomas Tutte (Bill) 1917-2002 , who’s roots were in Buckinghamshire, England. Bill was a talented mathematician and cryptographer who worked in Bletchley Park in WW2 alongside Alan Turing. He is crediting with breaking the Lorenzo cipher, which many feel was a greater and more important achievement than the higher profile Turing and the Enigma.

After the war, Bill moved to Canada, married and became head of maths (math in this country!) at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Apparently, Bill was a very unassuming guy and not one to blow his own trumpet and it took 50 years or so for his story to come out. He was recognised at last with a memorial in his home town of Newmarket and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2001. (That’s a big deal here).

No links here, but for anyone interested, there’s lots of stories about Bill on Google.