My Great Grandmother

Recently I've been delving into my family history again and, as those of you following my 40 things list may have noticed, lately my Mum and I have made some real progress.

As long as anyone in our family can remember, there has been a big mystery about my great-grandmother - Isabella Allan. We knew she came from up towards Jarrow and left her family there to move to Yorkshire in the twenties. There she met my great-grandfather and started another family.

We never knew why she moved or what happened until recently. With the help of my Dad's cousin who is a semi-professional genealogist, we have found some long lost cousins - the descendents of the children Isabella left up north.

Here's what we can piece together. She married Joseph Patterson at the age of seventeen and had two sons. Joseph went of to fight in World War One. When he came home on leave he discovered that Isabella was having an affair resulting in a third pregnancy. He took their two sons to live with his parents and returned to war where he was killed in Belgium.

Isabella gave her third son up for adoption but he did make contact later in life.

The next years are still a bit of a mystery but at some point she moved to Thorner and once settled, sent for her fourth (!) son to join her.

In Thorner she met my Great-Grandfather Willie and had three children with him before she passed away in the late 1950s.

It is a story full of scandal and shame and we've certainly had mixed feelings while learning all of this but I do believe it's the right time for this to come out. We're so over the moon to find that we have more cousins and that Isabella's older sons had good lives despite the tragic start.

I don't judge Isabella for what she did. We will never know why she had an affair but she was young and alone with two children in very unstable times. I never knew her so I can't say what kind of person she was. Plus, if she hadn't had this background, I wouldn't be here! Families and family histories are full of this kind of 'scandal'.

I'm so glad we finally know more about her and now we can start to look further back too.