I remember my grandmother vaguely. My mother took me to visit when I was quite young and I remember an old lady with white hair, dressed in black, sitting in the corner of the room, in the house where my Uncle Jack lived. She died in 1949.She used to give me silver threepenny pieces to save.

My mother told me tales of going out into the country to a farm on a horse and trap with my grandmother. I always assumed that this was to visit the Reade family but I do not know for sure.

My grandmother, Charlotte Clara Hodgkinson, was born in 1875. She had two brothers and a sister. Sadly her mother died soon after her birth and she went to live with other people.

I spent several years trying to find her on the 1881 and 1891 censuses but had no luck until the rise of all the family history sites.

I knew she married my grandfather in 1900 and I had a certificate. I also had her baptism certificate and birth certificate, but where did she go in the meantime? I looked for her with relatives of her mother, Hannah.

Before marriage Hannah was Hannah Reade and she came from Wybunbury in Cheshire. There were plenty of Reade relatives but Charlotte was not living with them.

After a gap from my research I decided to have another look for Charlotte Clara as it was now much easier to search for her on family history web sites. I now had access to these and did not have to trawl through miles of film in the record office.

Using wildcards and other snippets of information I found her on one internet site and this led me to find her on another site.

In 1891 she was under the name of Clara Hodgkinson living with the Rooke family as an adopted daughter. This family was living next door to my great grandfather’s family so that felt right too.

Now I had something to go on and I eventually found her, in 1881 with the same family but as Charlotte Clara H Rooke.

A mystery solved, but it goes to show that you should never give up and keep on searching as more information comes on-line.

I only have one photo of Charlotte and her husband John which was taken at my mothers wedding just before the outbreak of WW2.