Roand Paul Madgett share their research journey, in which they worked together to investigate the origins of Ro’s grandmother
OVERSEAS ORIGINS
One particular sentence in ‘The Value of Seeking Evidence’ article by David Annal in November 2022 Family Tree caught our eye: ‘… we mustn’t ignore the very strong possibility that the person we’re looking for was born with a different name to the one that he or she routinely used in later life.’ This is certainly true of Ro’s maternal grandmother, of whose first and last surnames (out of four!) we initially had no knowledge.
Despite having researched our family histories on and off for many years, and acquired a vast store of information along the way, mystery surrounded Ro’s mother’s maternal line.
Ro’s mother (Elizabeth Ann Gripper, known as Ann) was born to Geoffrey Frank and Krysia Gripper in Shropshire in 1928. Not long after her birth she was deposited in a children’s home (exactly where isn’t known) and her parents went abroad. Geoff was a mining engineer and went to work in what is now Malaysia. It could be that it was considered unsafe or unhealthy for a small baby to be taken to the tropics, but the ensuing years made it plain that she wasn’t actually wanted for reasons we can only guess at. When she was about 18 months old, her paternal grandmother arranged for her to come and live near to her in North Devon as a live-in companion to the young daughter of the local doctor. Ann lived with them and later a houseful of other children who had been taken in by the doctor and his wife who ran the place as an informal children’s home. She stayed there until she was about 12 and we have no evidence that either of her parents visited her on their occasional returns to the UK.
Krysia and Geoff eventually divorced and Krysia ‘reclaimed’ Ann to live with her in Bournemouth at about the same time she remarried. From the very little that Ann told Ro later, these were desperately unhappy years and she eventually ran away and returned to her paternal grandmother before deciding to train as a nurse as she would then have accommodation provided.
We know a great deal about Geoff ’s family background, but Krysia remained a taboo topic whilst Ann was alive. All we knew at the time was that Krysia was a ‘Polish’
