Cousins reunited

At the Edinburgh Eye Pavilion  the other day, I met  a cousin  I did not know existed. Aged ninety, she was, like me, being treated for macular degeneration, an irksome malady which, for me, interferes with writing and reading but is held at bay with eye injections.

In the waiting room, along with her daughter, she had heard my name being called, and recognised it. My wife, who was with me, heard the words “music critic ” being murmured by someone  nearby. Not until later, when I was  about to leave, did we come face to face, and I realised that I was more than a music critic to her.

Spry and alert, she came straight to the point with the information that  she was related to me, on my mother’s side of the family. Her grandmother had been my grandmother’s sister.

This was news to me, since I did not even know that my granny had had a sister, although, married twice, she had made me aware that she had had two husbands, both of whom (the first,  my grandfather,  an army bandsman, the  second a prosperous traveller who collected antiques in Japan) were  dead before I was born.

My newfound cousin, I learned, had holidayed with me and my parents in Comely Bank, where I spent my early childhood, though I have no recollection of this, since I was scarcely out of my pushchair at the time.

Yet she had always remembered my unusual name which, she said, was that of the gynaecologist who had delivered me at a nursing home in Walker Street -  though my own understanding has always been that I was called after the German actor Conrad Veidt and the Polish writer Joseph Conrad. Still,  the gynaecologist struck me as a perfectly plausible addition to the list, especially as I knew that mine had been a difficult birth.  Nevertheless, had we had time, I would have liked to hear more from her about this.

But she correctly recalled that my Aunt Maymie, my mother’s sister (who, as I now realised, my cousin looked quite like) had lived in West Maitland Street at Haymarket;  and  she  confirmed that she belonged to the Paton side of the family, my granny’s name having been Joanna Keith Paton and my mother’s Joanna Paton Hunter,  with me myself following up the rear as Conrad Keith Wilson - the Paton link seeming by then to have been discarded.

Yet who knows? There are still things to discover  and I can see why  ancestry research has become a flourishing industry on the internet. Today, I should add, happens to mark what would have been my mother’s 110th birthday.
27 September 2015