I have just been on a trip back to London for the first time in 8 years. I have been back to visit the UK on numerous occasions, but this time I went as a tourist, and boy does it look good. I can't stand those who talk down the place. It's got more potential than any other city on earth and is, and will always be, this planet's capital.
On a more personal note, the spring sunshine was tremendous, the flowers were in full bloom and the trees were blossoming like adolescent shrubs awaiting full adulthood.
My purpose of visiting was to go to the National Archives in Kew, a place which, when the underground is shut for the weekend, requires a course in mapreading just to locate the place. I have been researching my family history for years, but unfortunately have had little opportunity to do it. At last, a period of time when I have the funds and the time.
We stayed in a delightful bed and (enormous) breakfast just two minutes away with a delightful room containing a bed whose mattress was so thick you couldn't get gamma rays to pass through it and when you lay on it your eyes instantly closed in some deft pavlovian manoeuvre only outdone by the effect of the smell of coffee, which naturally had the opposite effect.
On day one, I spent the morning getting acquainted with the place, learning the ropes and understanding that it wasn't going to reveal some Dan Brown-esque code to th esecret of my family. Chances were, I'd have had a stroke of luck finding anyone in the 1911 census, which was the obvious place to start. But find we did, and we recorded several generations of my paternal grandmother's family. It turns out that she was from a fairly well-to-do lineage.
The afternoon of day one passed quite slowly, trying to trace my grandfather's passage into London in 1915. He was a Russian Pole by nationality, but (and here is where the trail goes cold for now) he was born in Batumi, Georgia, then in the Russian Empire, and his last place of residence was Montréal, Canada. That is going to take quite a bit of unravelling. So, I have a very special footsoldier on the ground in Georgia as you read these lines, who is dedicating days to travelling from Tbilisi to Batumi and back again, a four-hundred kilometre journey, just to check out the records for me. He happens to be a professor of history, presidential medal-winning genealogist and speaker of Georgian, Russian, English and Hungarian. Pretty good credentials, and someone I have the ultimate faith in. If anyone can solve the riddle of my grandfather's birthright then he can. If he is unable to find any trace of him there, I will probably have to go back to Moscow.
Either that, or I will need to contemplate the unthinkable: that he lied about his past. You never know, it might be for a good reason. But I think we're far enough in the future to realise that it has no consequence in the present.
Now stay with me in this next bit: my grandfather made the journey to London on Merchant Navy ships, arriving on 22nd December 1915. He was about 25 years old. Within three years he had swept a married woman with one child off her feet and she had divorced her poor husband, serving King and country in France. The divorce proceedings were quite fiery, especially considering the period in history. Back then it was pretty difficult to get a divorce, and adultery was one of the only ways. It was still a man's world, so once for a woman and she was shelved, whereas a man could do it as often as he liked and only when he became a local scandal maker could the wife divorce him. In my grandmother's case, a child was evidence enough for the divorce.
The rhetoric spewed in the proceedings say, that my grandmother was "guilty of adultery" in "divers (sic) locations". Wow, they really knew how to write seriously in those days.
The second day was spent checking my grandfather's Merchant Navy records. I went through about 400 documents, spread over 8 records and found very little. I need to return there in the coming months.
The Eurostar terminal at St Pancras is a delight. You really feel like you're going on a great journey when you arrive there. It sort of harks back to the glory days of rail travel: the great old iron and glass roof, the iron pillars and the brickwork on the cathedral-like station make it a pleasure, despite the bustling concourse full of shops.
So, finally, I have decided that the following course of action needs to be taken to get to the secret of my grandfather's ancestry: I am going to Marseille soon, Poland soon after, and I will take my main holidays in Georgia if the professor comes up with some interesting evidence.
