Serendipity In The Pages Of The London Gazette

The London Gazette is useful online resource for discovering all sorts of family information that is published in the public domain. I've found it invaluable when attempting to analyse the circumstances in which our ancestors lived.

Sometimes one discovers the unexpected. For example here is my grandmother, Gladys Elizabeth Degville, newly appointed as a telephonist in Birmingham (published 5 March 1929).

After the death of her parents my grandmother was brought up in a convent and had little contact with her extended family. Here The London Gazette is advertising her late father's estate so that it could be claimed by his kin. This process seems to have gone on for some time after the end of the First World War as this particular advert appeared on 4 May 1926.

When my grandmother fled the convent to live in the YWCA and avoided being resettled in Canada she would have thought £1.16 (and that is shillings not pence) a small fortune.

Gladys Elizabeth Kimberley nee Degville (1911-1991)
with my father John Kimberley