Who do I ask? .............. Lost family stories

I will never know who this man is, or when he posed for this picture on a building site in Derby or for that matter any of the other men in the remaining two pictures.

They were found in a collection of old photographs that we inherited long after my grandparents and parents had all died.

None of them were very promising, for all three were negatives and have rested in an old torn envelope for eighty years.  The original prints have long since been lost and at first glance these did not offer up much.

For a start they were not the usual small size negatives so would not fit into one of those commercial machines you can buy to reproduce a print and they seemed pretty faded.

But ever the optimist I put them through the home scanner and this is what we got.  Despite their age they have a quality and detail which is remarkable.

That said I did manage to reverse one image, so that on close inspection the lettering on the shop front is back to back.  Given time I shall correct the mistake but for now this is what you have got.

Now I think we must be dealing with my grandfather who pretty much lived his entire life in Derby.

He had been born in Birmingham in 1899, lived in Kent around the turn of the last century and was in Derby from 1902, when his mother gave birth to his sister in the Derby Workhouse.

The next thirteen years of his life were spent in various care homes including a year in a naval boot camp before like so many young men he was swept up by the Great War.

He enlisted in 1916 and stayed in the army until 1922.  By which time he had met and married my grandmother who was German and they had two young children.

So much of his early life and their married lives in Derby remains a mystery.  Indeed I doubt that he had much of an idea about the first five or so years of his life.  For whatever reason my great grandparents parted company in 1902 and I doubt he had much more than a vague memory of his father.

This may account for why on his marriage certificate he gave his place of birth as the Transvaal in South Africa which was where my great grandfather had served in the early 1890s or just possibly was motivated by a desire to seem a little more romantic to his young German bride and the assembled family and civic authorities.

And that air of mystery continued through the next twenty years in Derby.  I can only guess at how difficult grandmother found the journey alone with two small children from Germany to Derby for her husband had been transported separately to the UK and demobbed in Belfast.

The early years of their marriage were difficult, she encountered some anti German hostility and he found it difficult to find regular work.

Which brings me back to the pictures.

I think I can indentify one of the men as grandfather standing at the back of the group in the last picture, but of the man on the building site, and sitting alone on the upturned barrel I am less sure.

Of course there will be those who question does it matter?

Well to me it does, but even if that is put aside there is that more general point that so many family pictures are lost to us because no one bothered to provide a name of a date.

Those long lost relatives and friends of family stare back at us with no means of knowing who they were or their significance in the story of who we are.

That said these are a little snapshot of how we worked eighty or so years ago and are also a reminder of just how much chance plays in the survival of family memorabilia.   The original prints have long since vanished but the negatives not much cared for at the time were just put to one side and lasted the course.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson