Lost Cousins and Uncles!

I was born and spent my early life in Devonshire in a small hamlet five miles from the nearest town.

My father, a Cockney from Bermondsey, was a wounded ex-soldier recovering from horrendous injuries incurred at the “Battle of the Bulge” who had been advised to move to the West Country for his health. Ironically he had met my Mum in a Drs Surgery in the little Cornish town of Launceston.

As was most often the case back in the 50s we seldom left our district and holidays away from home were rare indeed. That said when I was about eight we all went on a camping holiday on the Scottish border. My Mum, Dad and younger sister and myself somehow all managed to squeeze into and sleep in a small orange and yellow ridge tent. An adventure like that is seldom forgotten and one of my treasured memories is sitting in the entrance to the tent with the smell of freshly fried bacon and eggs wafting across the entrance as we watched a little river throwing up spumes of white water as it sped through large grey boulders.

On the way back from there we called into the town of Bootle to visit my Uncle Fred and my cousins. I had never met them before and was amazed at how much my oldest cousin, David, looked like me. Of course the Liverpool accent of my cousins was strange and new to me but we all got on well and I remember playing in the street outside their house. A railway arch dominated the bottom of their road and it was black with ingrained soot. The grass and houses nearby all seemed to be affected in the same way. This was all so different to my little hamlet of five widely spaced houses and a couple of barns!

We had not been playing in the street for long when a group of youths approached us and decided we should not be playing on their street. The timely intervention of Uncle Fred and Dad coming out of the front door prevented any serious injuries but my thoughts on Liverpool and the North were coloured from that point on!

That was the one and only time I had met my three cousins and within a few years they had moved to Australia.

Three years ago I joined Lost Cousins and also published some of my research onto a web tree. Almost immediately I had a hit from a distant cousin living in Wales from my Mums side of the family. He was able to fill in several gaps in my research for which I was delighted. Then, amazingly, I had my cousin David contact me.

Thirty-five years before my Father had died taking any family address’s with him! We had completely lost touch with all our family on Dads side. I was away with the Army serving in Germany and elsewhere so things were allowed to drift and of course when I left the army and wanted to get in touch with family I had no luck in finding any.

Now, approaching sixty, my new hobby had suddenly achieved what I had failed to all those years before! David, it turned out, had returned from Australia with his family and then followed much the same course as myself. We had both joined the army in boy’s service; me into the Royal Engineers and David into the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers! We both served in Germany and he had indeed married a local German girl and settled over there.

We arranged to meet up and they came to stay with us at our home for a holiday. He turned out to be a great chap and we had a fine time showing off our Medway Towns to them both.

This year we are returning to Germany and will be staying with my “Lost Cousin”
There is even a postscript to this. Feeling so lucky to have found him again I contacted Canadian Immigration as I knew another of my Dads brothers had moved out there in the 50s. Within weeks I had an e-mail from him, “I wasn’t lost; I knew where I was!” We have been in close contact ever since! You really can’t beat this for a hobby!

Ken