About

I have always been interested in History.

As a young child, I liked visiting museums and learning about the past. I grew up in a Victorian house in Lower Wortley, Leeds. I would think about what life was like for previous occupants at different points in time. Who else had slept in my bedroom in years gone by? Did the first occupants have a maid who worked in the tiny kitchen, cooking for a large family? Did coal used to get delivered directly into the cellar down the coal chute? Despite this inquisitiveness, I already had some ideas of who had lived in this house before, as it was haunted!

In an effort to find out more about “the ghost,” by age 15 my best friend and I had researched who all the previous owners were. This was the pre-internet early 90’s, so we had to do this in the local history section of Leeds Central Library. Using old maps, census data, electoral lists, old phone books, newspaper articles, as well as the death, birth and marriage registers, we pieced together who had previously lived at number 60.

Fast forward a few decades and I discovered some letters from an ancestor called Fred Emms in a drawer. I needed to find out who Fred was, what he did and what his story was. Using the same info as I used in Leeds Central Library in 1992, although this time online, I searched Fred back to his four years on the Battlefields of France. I found out he sadly died just before the end of the war. I found out he was my Great Uncle. I wanted to tell his story, so I did. I wrote Freds Letters.

I am now a volunteer for the Commonwealth War Graves Committee. I look after war graves in Hunslet Old and Hunslet New cemeteries in Leeds, plus Dean Road, Scarborough. I want to research the story behind every grave I look after.