Phoenix of Hamble
Active member
I'm rather pleased this evening... my father and I have been doing a little work on our family tree with the discovery of a lot of letters and paperwork from my grandmother, and some records found elsewhere, which has always been a big vague... my surname is rather germanic, and my grandmother would never talk about its origin, so we assumed some kind of scandal in the past...
It appears we were half right.... my great-grandfather was a German, and was interred in a camp on the Isle of Man during the first world war... we have even found the cards that my great-grandmother had to sign every week at the local police station in Barrow upon Humber as she was married to an 'alien'.
So.... the ties to the east coast?
It transpires, that the reason my German great grandfather ended up in the UK, and actually in Hull, was that he was a deep sea fisherman at the end of the 19th century, operating on a wooden, sail powered fishing boat in the Arctic circle for most of his life, and met and fell in love with an English girl as a young man visiting the North sea ports... reading recollections of the life of the Arctic fisherman of that era brings a lump to my throat... one of the hard men of a time gone by... he has my utter respect. He eventually retired from the fishing industry, and ended up as the chief engineer on one of the small ferries crossing the humber, before being interred as war broke out.
And the scandal?
He was so offended by the treatment he faced by being interred, that after the war, he abandoned his family, and went back to Germany.
I am really chuffed if I am honest... I have often wondered why the sea was in my blood... and there it is... someone to look up to. A real seaman of a time when it really meant the difference between life and death... and an east coaster!
It appears we were half right.... my great-grandfather was a German, and was interred in a camp on the Isle of Man during the first world war... we have even found the cards that my great-grandmother had to sign every week at the local police station in Barrow upon Humber as she was married to an 'alien'.
So.... the ties to the east coast?
It transpires, that the reason my German great grandfather ended up in the UK, and actually in Hull, was that he was a deep sea fisherman at the end of the 19th century, operating on a wooden, sail powered fishing boat in the Arctic circle for most of his life, and met and fell in love with an English girl as a young man visiting the North sea ports... reading recollections of the life of the Arctic fisherman of that era brings a lump to my throat... one of the hard men of a time gone by... he has my utter respect. He eventually retired from the fishing industry, and ended up as the chief engineer on one of the small ferries crossing the humber, before being interred as war broke out.
And the scandal?
He was so offended by the treatment he faced by being interred, that after the war, he abandoned his family, and went back to Germany.
I am really chuffed if I am honest... I have often wondered why the sea was in my blood... and there it is... someone to look up to. A real seaman of a time when it really meant the difference between life and death... and an east coaster!
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did he clean up ok
