Saturday, December 6, 2025

A Genealogical Goldmine

In 1944, my aunt (Gladys) made this scrapbook for her only sister, who was soon to be married. While most of the pages were cut out from magazines, like this one
some held the answers for which I've searched high and low.The first question was about a cousin named Tore, who my mother wrote about in several letters to my father. All I had was a first name, the fact that his parents were Norwegian, and they escaped from Norway in World War II. Hunting through newspapers with such limited information, hadn't yielded an results. But lo and behold, here were four articles about him!
It turns out the little boy was named Tore (Thore) Kvammen, and he was born in the last quarter of 1942 in the Hammersmith District of London, during an air raid. His mother was the daughter of Karoline Antoinette Larsen and Bernhardt Johannesen, who was born in 1918 and married to Mathias Kvammen, a Norwegian army captain. The mother and son left from Swansea, Wales on 11 Mar 1944 on the Grey County, a Norwegian merchant vessel that could carry up to 12 pass. It was involved in various convoys, often sailing between North America, Halifax, St John, New Brunswick and the UK. An article published in the Chicago Tribune - 26 Oct 1944 - p.15 reported the following story. When they arrived in Canada, the mother stayed in Toronto, serving as a member of the Norwegian Women's Army, based at Camp Little Norway. Her 2 year old son, traveled by train in the care of a 20 year old Royal Norwegian Air Force flier, Just Ebesen, and then left with my grandparents, and my mother, who was living at home. My grandmother is quoted as saying "She will keep the child until her niece is able to come for him - in a month or a year." I'm not sure exactly how long he did stay, although I do know that in March 1945, he left from St John, New Brunswick, Canada to return to Liverpool, England. Much more of the story remains to be uncovered.
The other mystery solved by the scrapbook had to do with who was in my parents wedding. I share the sharpened image here:
Before finding the newspaper article in the scrapbook, I could only identify my parents, her siblings, Roy and Gladys, and the flower girl, her niece Virginia. That left the two bridesmaids, two groomsmen, and the ring bearer, who I now know to be Katherine Golden and Edith Streat, mom's schoolmates, and Stewart Grove and William Morgan, who I believe to be dad's friends from the navy. The little ring bearer was a 5 year old named Lee Brink. All those people with stories to tell. Whose stories can I find and share?

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