Alan Crosby's family history blog: a trip to Poland

Our regular columnist Alan Crosby updates us on his family history finds – including an exciting trip to Poland

Wednesday 13 October 2010
Alan Crosby, editor of The Local Historian
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Well, it's been a very exciting few weeks for my genealogical researches. Being a quaint old-fashioned sort of person I’ve always been a little hesitant about online resources, but that view has now changed dramatically.

In late September I went to Poland for a few days to stay with my relatives. My second cousin Wojciech is a leading mathematician, but also a really great family historian, and he’d prepared a sensational surprise for me.

For sixty years we, first my father and latterly I, had been trying to find out what happened to my grandfather (Wojtek’s great-uncle), who disappeared in Australia in 1930. And on 17 September, in the unlikely setting of a house in the suburbs of Kraków, the solution to the mystery was revealed. Wojtek had done a huge amount of on-line searching, using his scientific ingenuity to crack the puzzle.

My grandfather had ‘adopted’ a different name, and that’s how he was tracked down. So, I learned not only what had happened to him (he managed an aboriginal station in the Hunter Valley in the 1950s, died in 1959, and is buried in a beautiful cemetery in Canberra) but also that he had remarried in the 1940s and had a another son – so I now have a newly-discovered uncle (to be genealogically accurate, a ‘half-uncle’) in Queensland.

We’ve made contact, are exchanging emails, and at last the main missing piece on my genealogical jigsaw puzzle can be put in place. I can’t really claim the credit – but it’s at last shown me, the Luddite, the true value of on-line resources.

That my cousin could research and solve a mystery about something that happened on the other side of the world between 1930 and 1960 is simply astonishing. I’ve seen my grandfather’s military record from the Australian forces 1941-1943, and a picture where he’s buried, just at the click of a couple of buttons. Even ten years ago it would have been scarcely imaginable. I’m a convert!