Day 146

Seeking answers in writing stories or novels

…

Would I? Yes.

I am in the middle of researching my family history. For a long time, I didn’t have any interest. My parents never talked of their relatives, and the only relatives I remember seeing are my mother’s mother, one uncle, my mother’s brother, and vaguely, my father’s older sister.

I knew that my older brother was dabbling in the family history over the last 40 years, and got to meet and talk to a lot of people I never knew existed.

Then he sent me some family trees, and I was hooked.

There was stuff my paratns said, perhaps when they never realised we were listening, that my mother had an older sister whm she was extremely jealous of, and I think I met her once or twice, that my mothers father had committed suicide and his son found him, still alive, and was traumatised beyone imagination.

I could believe it. We stayed with my grandmother in her country house, and it was an oasis away from my normal life, and it fed an imagination that inspired many stories. And that I began to live in lots of different worlds, any world but reality.

But…

My father’s mother! Wow!

What 25 year old girl, in England, who was not wealthy, and in the year 1914 whe the world was in upheaval and war clouds were gathering, left her safe job as a milliner in Gillingham, Dorset, to get on a ship with 1,300 other strange souls to spend a month with, and come to of all places Melbourne Australia.

This was my grandmother, the adventuress!

There’s a story to be told, and I’m writing it.

So yes, I will be writing the story, based on fact, but a little embellishment, but someone I never knew, and I think if I’d ever realised who she was, I would have talked to her about it. I was sixteen when she died, and I never really knew her, or rarely saw her.

If I only knew then what I know now…