Family history research can sometimes stop you dead in your tracks. It is impossible not to empathise with your ancestors and family members, impossible not to put yourself in their shoes.
How did my mother feel, aged 14, to be told just a few days before Christmas that her dad had died and she was orphaned? How did Margaret’s great-grandmother feel leaving three children, including a baby, in the workhouse at Market Harborough? How did my grandfather feel about to go into battle at Loos in the First World War?
This morning I’d been on a bit of a side project. I’d picked up the laptop and was spending an hour in bed with Holly and Gravel (our two springer spaniels) snoozing peacefully and I thought I’d try to tie up some loose ends.
The family history project had started with me scanning some photos and loading them to Flickr for safe keeping. I’d asked Margaret her grandfather’s name and she didn’t know it. We now know so much ...
One of the pictures in the box was of Margaret’s Aunt Edna, the sister of her dad Norman, and a very stern-looking woman - not the sort you’d want to be on the wrong side of. Margaret didn’t know much about her except that she had a daughter named Delores and had married a Pole or “jam roll” (as he was unaffectionately called) after the Second World War. That match clearly hadn’t gone down well with the family.
After the war, even when I was a boy, there were still refugee camps around Cheshire. Marbury Camp, on the site of old Marbury Hall was a collection of dozens of small brick bungalows with concrete roofs hastily put up to house people displaced from all over Europe. The Poles had been our allies and were generally fairly well thought of, but they weren’t English and there was a wariness (and dislike) of foreigners in those days that just doesn’t exist in the same way now.
There were also camps at Delamere and Oulton Park, where the race track is now. It’s funny because we are now having a second wave of Polish immigrants and there’s a certain tension about “Poles taking our jobs”. I guess it was the same back then, although the Poles of the late 1940s were fleeing for their lives first from Hitler and then from Stalin; they certainly weren’t economic migrants.
I thought I’d try to trace Aunt Edna’s history. I had a birth year, place of birth and her maiden name - Edna Burrows. Looking for a marriage record produced some possibilities. There was a marriage between an Edna Burrows and a Henry Carpendale in Northwich in 1941. Carpendale didn’t sound very Polish. I then found a Delores born to Edna and Henry Carpendale. So Edna had married Henry Carpendale, a serjeant in the 2nd Battalion, Staffordshire Regiment in 1941 and they had a daughter. Chances are that Henry had been killed and she’d remarried (the Pole) after the war.
It didn’t take long to confirm that. Henry Carpendale is buried in a war cemetery in Tunisia along with 2,000 others who died in the final battle to take Tunis in 1943. The Staffordshire regiment had been involved in some bitter fighting and had to hold a couple of strategic hills against fierce German counter-attacks.
The Germans had been driven out of north Africa, but less than two years after being married, aged 25 and with a daughter just a year old, Edna was a widow.
Furnished with Edna’s married name, I was able to search again and I soon came up with a second marriage, this time to Aleksander Mikalski in 1948, when Edna was 31. This was the marriage that had caused such controversy, so much that it was still talked of in resentful terms 30 years later. She was the one who married the Pole ...
What could I find out about Aleksander? He was born in 1922, five years younger than Edna and would have been just 17 when the Nazis invaded his country. Had he fought in the war? Perhaps he’d been a Spitfire pilot or in one of the fierce-fighting Polish battalions who hated the Germans with such a vengeance.
I did a quick search and the first match that was returned was entitled “Germany, Dachau Concentration Camp Records, 1945”. It was one of those moments when your blood runs cold.
Aleksander Mikalski - prisoner number 4460 - had arrived in Dachau by train on 19 April 1940 (the Germans kept excellent records) and he had managed to survive five years of forced labour, starvation, overcrowding and a typhus epidemic to be freed when the Americans liberated Dachau in 1945. The US soldiers were so appalled by what they saw in the camp that they started executing the German guards. The incident is now shrouded in mystery, some estimates say 500 guards were killed by American soldiers and freed camp prisoners. There was a court martial, but the US commander General Patton dismissed the charges and witness records were destroyed.
Aleksander made Northwich his home; he married Edna Carpendale, a 31-year-old widow with a six-year-old child three years later and died in hospital in Manchester, in 1969, aged 49.
There are links here to previous blog postings concerning family history:
Richard Gibson Little
Family History Mysteries
Family History Medals
Could my ancestors vote?
Letter from Amarica
Would Zachariah have seen a banana?
Visiting the past ...
Welcome to the family
Pelsall Colliery follow-up
Relative killed in mining disaster
How did my mother feel, aged 14, to be told just a few days before Christmas that her dad had died and she was orphaned? How did Margaret’s great-grandmother feel leaving three children, including a baby, in the workhouse at Market Harborough? How did my grandfather feel about to go into battle at Loos in the First World War?
This morning I’d been on a bit of a side project. I’d picked up the laptop and was spending an hour in bed with Holly and Gravel (our two springer spaniels) snoozing peacefully and I thought I’d try to tie up some loose ends.
The family history project had started with me scanning some photos and loading them to Flickr for safe keeping. I’d asked Margaret her grandfather’s name and she didn’t know it. We now know so much ...
One of the pictures in the box was of Margaret’s Aunt Edna, the sister of her dad Norman, and a very stern-looking woman - not the sort you’d want to be on the wrong side of. Margaret didn’t know much about her except that she had a daughter named Delores and had married a Pole or “jam roll” (as he was unaffectionately called) after the Second World War. That match clearly hadn’t gone down well with the family.
 |
| Aunt Edna - quite stern looking |
After the war, even when I was a boy, there were still refugee camps around Cheshire. Marbury Camp, on the site of old Marbury Hall was a collection of dozens of small brick bungalows with concrete roofs hastily put up to house people displaced from all over Europe. The Poles had been our allies and were generally fairly well thought of, but they weren’t English and there was a wariness (and dislike) of foreigners in those days that just doesn’t exist in the same way now.
There were also camps at Delamere and Oulton Park, where the race track is now. It’s funny because we are now having a second wave of Polish immigrants and there’s a certain tension about “Poles taking our jobs”. I guess it was the same back then, although the Poles of the late 1940s were fleeing for their lives first from Hitler and then from Stalin; they certainly weren’t economic migrants.
I thought I’d try to trace Aunt Edna’s history. I had a birth year, place of birth and her maiden name - Edna Burrows. Looking for a marriage record produced some possibilities. There was a marriage between an Edna Burrows and a Henry Carpendale in Northwich in 1941. Carpendale didn’t sound very Polish. I then found a Delores born to Edna and Henry Carpendale. So Edna had married Henry Carpendale, a serjeant in the 2nd Battalion, Staffordshire Regiment in 1941 and they had a daughter. Chances are that Henry had been killed and she’d remarried (the Pole) after the war.
It didn’t take long to confirm that. Henry Carpendale is buried in a war cemetery in Tunisia along with 2,000 others who died in the final battle to take Tunis in 1943. The Staffordshire regiment had been involved in some bitter fighting and had to hold a couple of strategic hills against fierce German counter-attacks.
The Germans had been driven out of north Africa, but less than two years after being married, aged 25 and with a daughter just a year old, Edna was a widow.
Furnished with Edna’s married name, I was able to search again and I soon came up with a second marriage, this time to Aleksander Mikalski in 1948, when Edna was 31. This was the marriage that had caused such controversy, so much that it was still talked of in resentful terms 30 years later. She was the one who married the Pole ...
What could I find out about Aleksander? He was born in 1922, five years younger than Edna and would have been just 17 when the Nazis invaded his country. Had he fought in the war? Perhaps he’d been a Spitfire pilot or in one of the fierce-fighting Polish battalions who hated the Germans with such a vengeance.
I did a quick search and the first match that was returned was entitled “Germany, Dachau Concentration Camp Records, 1945”. It was one of those moments when your blood runs cold.
Aleksander Mikalski - prisoner number 4460 - had arrived in Dachau by train on 19 April 1940 (the Germans kept excellent records) and he had managed to survive five years of forced labour, starvation, overcrowding and a typhus epidemic to be freed when the Americans liberated Dachau in 1945. The US soldiers were so appalled by what they saw in the camp that they started executing the German guards. The incident is now shrouded in mystery, some estimates say 500 guards were killed by American soldiers and freed camp prisoners. There was a court martial, but the US commander General Patton dismissed the charges and witness records were destroyed.
Aleksander made Northwich his home; he married Edna Carpendale, a 31-year-old widow with a six-year-old child three years later and died in hospital in Manchester, in 1969, aged 49.
 |
| Polish prisoners celebrate their liberation at Dachau concentration camp |
There are links here to previous blog postings concerning family history:
Richard Gibson Little
Family History Mysteries
Family History Medals
Could my ancestors vote?
Letter from Amarica
Would Zachariah have seen a banana?
Visiting the past ...
Welcome to the family
Pelsall Colliery follow-up
Relative killed in mining disaster
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