I’m seriously into genealogy. I was adopted, but I know who my birth mother is, I met her a few times before she died at the end of the 1990’s. My father is a mystery – so far.
Last year I took my DNA with Ancestry, and when the results came back, a whole new world literally opened up before my eyes! I had connections – all be it distant – in America, Germany, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. My continued search is another story that I’m sure you will hear about.
Why I’m writing this today, because in the United Kingdom Sunday 27th January 2019 is Holocaust Memorial Day. For many of us, this is something that we have read about, learned in school, and have seen at least one of the films that has been made about the events that happened in WW2.
I opened up an email a few weeks ago from My Heritage. a genealogy site that allows you like many others to build up your family history. Quite an innocuous email, names I didn’t recognise. I clicked on one of the names to see if the snippet of information could lead me to some other information I already held. It said the girl had died in a concentration camp. When I looked at her parents, it said the same. This information was like a jab in my heart. These unknown people who were in my history somewhere had died in the most terrible way I could imagine!
Of course I never knew them, and I have no idea how they are related to me. It was only up until a year ago that I imagined I could be feeling this wave of sadness today.
Our history is so much more than a birth, marriage and a death certificate isn’t it?
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