Finding ancestors of my mother, Edith Fanny Bullock, was to be much more difficult. The major reason for this is that my mother died in 1946, after only nine years of marriage, leaving behind my father with two children under eight.
It was imperative at that time, just after the war had ended, that my father continue working. Times were hard enough, without the added hardship of being out of work with young children. So my father remarried fairly quickly.
The result was that we lost touch with any relatives of my mother, and as we grew older it became harder to re-establish any contact. Important documents, birth certificates, marriage certificates etc. were lost.
Now, here we were, some sixty years later trying to find them.
There were a few pieces of information that we had about my mother. We had an approximate birth date - knowing how old she was when she died - and we had some idea of where she lived before marrying. My younger brother believed she came from Astley, in what would then have been Worcestershire.
But that was all. We had no idea of her fathers names, or her mothers, and any brothers and sisters were completely unknown to us.
We searched, and searched, and searched, to no avail. Even with all the contact sites we had, all of the likely fathers for Edith in and around Astley turned out to be dead ends. They were not directly related.
Eventually I persuaded my elder brother to obtain a copy of the marriage certificate. This is not as easy as it sounds because the process presupposes that you have certain basic information. And we could only guess at some of this. Eventually we narrowed it down and were able to obtain a copy of the certificate.
