Great Granny May introduction

So I've been trying to find the grave of my great grandmother, Winifred May Singh (nee O'Donoghue) for a decade now. I don't have much to go on, a box of old photographs, a couple of family stories, and bits and pieces i have pieced together from here and there.

I did visit a house where she and her husband, Sardar Jogendra Singh, lived back in the 1920s and 30s in Aira Estate, a days travel by buses from Lucknow, India, and I did meet an old man who remembered her from his childhood there. The "English Lady" he called her although she was in fact Irish, or so I've been led to believe, and I did learn the Singh family had sold the place and upped sticks to Shimla back in the 1950s. Unfortunately by the time I had discovered this I only had a week left of my six month visa to be in India, and Shimla was a week away up in the Himalayas from Aira Estate, so I didn't get to follow that part of the story up. I do intend doing so at a later date, but that meeting in Aira Estate was already back in May 2006 so the years have been rolling by.

But what is the story? I have been tweeting, as he describes himself, "historian, edutainer and broadcaster, Matthew Ward, over the last few weeks and months to try and work out how to find out the story of Lady Singh. I don't own a tv so don't know his work, but what captured my attention was his posts on twitter of old Sikhs and Sikh issues in old photographs and documents. I should probably mention here that my Irish great grandmother married a Sikh, the above mentioned Jogendra Singh. Anyway, Matthew Ward said to me that I need to write the story of my great grandmother, and so I shall endeavour to do that here, even though part of the purpose of writing this is in the hope someone out there will be able to add some meat to the bones of this story as I know very little. But what little I know I will share.

compassion

Compassion is a photographer's greatest asset. There but for the grace...

http://imgur.com/gallery/Po7i1

So i'm a photographer, and a magpie. Particularly of older images. Here are a couple I quite like at the moment taken from National Geographic.