| As wild as those other ideas may sound, this next idea beats them all. I have come to suspect that my grandfather was suffering from a type
of amnesia. If he did suffer a serious head injury, through a skating accident or otherwise, it may have affected his memory. Why, throughout his adult life, did he claim to be born and raised in Glasgow? Why - during more than 50 years of marriage - did he never mention to his wife Alice that he had a sister called Alice? Why did he never mention his brother George Leo? Why did he never mention being in the British Army? How and why did he come to lose contact with his family back in England? And how did he end up in Toronto, Canada when his last known address was in the Seattle/Tacoma area of the United States? Why did he claim to be from Glasgow? If his passport had been issued through the Glasgow office, he may have believed that he had lived there. Why not mention his siblings? If he couldn't remember his brother and sister, he obviously wouldn't mention them. How did he lose contact with his family? If he couldn't remember his family or where they lived, he wouldn't be able to maintain contact with them. Why did he invent the story about being disowned for marrying outside of his faith? Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps he found it easier to invent a story than to admit that he couldn't remember who his family were or where they lived. As far as how he ended up in Toronto is concerned, I feel that he may have been attempting to go home. Perhaps it was a skating accident or being asked to leave his brother's house that made him decide to go home. To get there he would have had to make his way across North America to Quebec where he could board a steamship bound for Liverpool. If he was working his way across he may have stopped in Toronto to save enough for the passage and decided to stay after meeting my grandmother. If his Marriage Certificate is to be believed, he was living in Toronto several months before Leo and Ellen decided to return to England. I can't help wondering if Leo passed through Toronto with his young family without knowing that his brother was living there. The fact that my granddad entered his parent's full names on his marriage license in 1916, and the fact that he did, on at least one occasion, mention his sister Maude leads me to believe that if he was suffering from a memory loss, it was only partial and that his memory may have improved as time went by. So, was he covering his tracks and telling lies for all of his adult life - or was it that he simply couldn't remember? Granddad has been gone for over 28 years and took his secrets with him. If we meet again on the other side he's going to have a lot of explaining to do! |