About two years ago I discovered a descendant on my grandfather Torrance’s side. Bill is my grandfather’s great nephew through his Grandpa’s sister Adele. The family comes from Hoddlesden, Lancashire. When I first started doing genealogy 25 years ago the only Torrance descendant I knew about was my first cousin Kathleen. We grew up together in Montreal, our mothers were sisters and very close. But we had no information about either of our maternal grandparents. In fact, Grandpa Torrance died when we were only 3 so we barely remembered him. Grandma destroyed any personal letters that might have existed; she did the same with her own correspondence. It was common in my family to do that, I have no personal correspondence from my parents or my paternal grandparents either.
It took me a few years to figure out where Grandpa was born, and a few more to piece together some of his family tree. But after ten years, and with online records expanding, I knew he had had several brothers and a sister who lived beyond childhood. Eleven years ago, armed with my quite sparse knowledge, I went to where he had grown up in Lancashire, to the church where my great grandparents had married. But no one in Hoddlesden knew what had happened to the Torrances, they were all gone. The folk at the church in Liverpool could explain how it came to be that my great grandparents, governess and gardener at a wealthy mill owner’s house, were married at St. Michael’s. But of course they didn’t know anything about THEM.
And then, about six years ago, I saw that someone had entered information for one of my great uncles, Robert Torrance Jr. I contacted him and, through him, started a correspondence with his sister Valorie, who is Robert’s great granddaughter. As I am. Bill is actually Robert’s great great grandson. Valorie and I have met each other a couple of times and she kids me that she is now my honorary “big sister.” But where were any other descendants, especially any that might have remained in the “old country.”
That mystery was solved two years ago when Bill’s wife Annie posted on Ancestry. I contacted her and, so exciting!, Bill was indeed related to me. And, even more exciting, he had, through his mother, letters that were written to my Swiss great grandmother from her sister who had remained in Switzerland in the 1870s! They were in French and the writing was sometimes difficult to decipher but what a treasure that was! They referred to my great great grandmother and to various other relatives, gossipy and fun.
When I had originally planned my March trip of 2020, Bill, Annie and I had arranged to meet. Of course that all got cancelled. But we continued to correspond as a group—Bill, Annie, Valorie and myself—exchanging views on the world, on COVID, on politics. Sharing newspaper articles. We discovered we all had similar opinions about the state of the world and it was fun to email each other as the UK endured lockdown and the US went through its own problems. Sadly, Bill became very ill and had an operation at the start of 2021. Which only strengthened my determination to meet him in person.
All of this culminated in meeting in St. Alban’s today. They met me at the train station and as soon as I climbed into the car and we looked at each other, we were family. Bill is in a wheelchair and, as St. Alban’s is a very hilly town, we processed to the cathedral and stayed there for the whole of our visit. Which was interesting as the University of Hertfordshire was having their commencement exercises in the cathedral. We could only scoot into the cathedral itself during the break between exercises; the rest of the time we sat in the very good cafe (golly I love cathedral cafes) and talked and talked and talked.
It was lovely and poignant. All too soon, I had to go back to the train station and return to London for my evening choral concert at St. Martins in the Field. But I will treasure this memory.
The concert at St. Martins was very good. I used to listen to cassettes of classical music produced by Neville Marriner who was, for many years, conductor at St. Martins. It’s also in a lovely location, cornering Trafalgar Square with, on one side, the National Gallery and, across the square, Canada House.
A wonderful day indeed.
What a thrilling re-connection. My older sister is more our family historian, and she admits that one can really go down a rabbit hole with Ancestry. She's reconnected with some distant cousins that way, oo.
ReplyDeleteWhat fun! So glad you got to meet Bill at last. Love the photos. What magnificent architecture!
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