I thank the Lord for the people I have found (Elton John/ Bernie Taupin)

Ripped from my Star Wars desktop calendar!

1930

23rd April

Taumarunui, King Country, New Zealand

Dulcie Mary Adsett.

This is the time and place of my mother's birth. 

Taumarunui is/was a pretty isolated place of about 3,000 people in 1930 - with no other settlements within cooee. Hasn't changed much! It's still pretty isolated as a community.

She was the last child born into the male dominated Adsett family - three older brothers and a sawmiller father who abandoned the family shortly after my mother was born. I never met him.

The Adsett clan  at mum and dad's wedding

In 1930 New Zealand was still recovering from the first World War when the Great Depression hit with a wallop. Jobs and wages were slashed, leaving many desperate families. The world didn't venture much into regional NZ and it could care less.

I can imagine what life was like for the young Dulcie, her mum and three brothers. They never talked of these early days, or if they did I was too young to understand things. But it must have been bleak!

After a time the fatherless Adsett family moved from Taumarunui to Auckland and Dulcie went to One Tree Hill Primary School and ultimately a better life until she died far too young in 1983 aged only 53.

This week my thoughts have returned to those few facts as I've been watching episodes of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?

I know a lot about the Purdys but far less about the Adsetts. In that photo I can see people I know - my grandmother Lucy Constance Adsett; her sons Jack, Roy, Mel Adsett, Aunts Millie and Gwen, and two cousins: Alan and Lorraine. That leaves four people in the photo that I'm related to but don't know.

This year she should have been 85.

Love and peace as always - Warren