search for my grandfather

Looking through my list of topics that I want to post about, I realised that I still haven't blogged about my search for information on my grandfather.

Basically, Dad's parents were married just after WWII - he was in Brisbane on R&R and she was the spoilt daughter of a wealthy grazier working in Brisbane during the war for something to do. After my father was born in 1945, they moved to America and settled near his parents who apparently (so I've been told) hated her because she "stole him" from his childhood sweetheart. She certainly hated it there - she wasn't prepared for a life of semi-poverty living in a caravan in the Deep South with a small baby. She was the sort of country girl who was used to having a bunch of workers to help out around the property and in the homestead, while his background was more like being one of the workers. So when she fell pregnant with my Dad's younger brother, she came back to the relative comforts of home to have the baby. From what I can gather, she expected him to follow her back to Australia, but he didn't, and instead they were divorced when my Dad was 2 years old.

My Dad is pretty hazy on the details, he barely remembers his father - hasn't seen him since he left America and hasn't heard from him since about a year after that.

Anyway, for ages now, I've been wanting to track him down and find out what happened to him after the divorce.

Unfortunately, the only real way to track him down was to either go to America and spend some time searching, or do hire a PI to do the investigation for me - neither of which I could really afford.

But now of course, there are all of these internet searches you can do. No details about next of kin though and I don't know how to find them without resorting to one of the previous avenues - visit the USA, or hire a PI. The first option is a possibility now that I'm earning well, but I'm not sure how successful it would be given that I only have a town of last residence and can't be sure that he even had any family in the area. The main problem with the second option is that I don't really know how to find a PI in the US that would take on a client who has no assets in the US and I can be sure wouldn't rip me off and I could pay by VISA or something from over here.

So in the meantime, I've done searches for newspapers in the area that might have run his obituary (which would have family details I hope), I've posted info on my search onto the family tree website for my last name, and I've found someone with my last name in the town he was born in who I'm writing to to see if she's related. I've found a whole heap of people with my last name where he died, and have emailed one of them to see if he's related to my grandfather - if that doesn't get any results, I might try a bulk mailout to the others.

And so the search continues.

Listening to: The Very Best Of The Pogues