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Not a lot to go on
When I first started researching my granny's mother, I knew very little about her. I had a photograph, and I knew she was born in India and that she had grown up in a children's home in Kalimpong, India with her two sisters. I knew her first name was Minnie and that her two sisters were Florence and Winifred, and that Winifred had died in childhood. I did not have the spelling of their surname though my granny thought it to be Borisbow. As I was later to find out, it is actually spelt Borissow. I started my search by asking on an India family research mailing list what home there were in Kalimpong, and I was given the name Dr Graham's Home. I searched the internet for the home and found their website and a email for the current headmaster. He was very helpful and told me they had had three girls fitting the details I gave him at the home. Information from India Minnie Borissow, Date of Birth 01/11/1904 Parents: He followed up this information by sending all the relevant documents, there father's letters to the home, their application forms, letters from the doctor about Winifred and her burial certificate. You can see more information on them here. The information from the home gave me some very important pieces of information, firstly the surname and secondly their fathers name. Census's and Telephone Directories From here I started looking for records of Borissow in England, I eventually found a Theo in the 1881 census in Cambridge, but it was listed a Theodora and a female. About the same time I went through the UK telephone directory and found all the Borissow's, luckily, its not a common name and I only found five or six listings in the whole of the UK. One of the people I contacted was also researching there family tree, Peter Borissow, he had a Theo, which belonged to the same family as I had found in the census, only they had him down as a he. The census transcription I had looked for him in must have had a mistake. Now I knew Theo's parents and his siblings, and from Peter a much wider tree of their parents and sibling. Using this I could tie in a lot of the snippets of information I found on the Borissow' while I was looking for Theo. Still Missing I still had one big part missing though. Minnie had died in 1932 after marrying and having my grandmother and her brother, Winifred had died as a child in 1918, but what had happened to Florence? No one I had contacted had come across her and I could not find any records for her. Eventually while reading my notes again, I came across I sentence from the principle of the home in India saying he had been informed of Minnie's death by a letter from Florence. I wrote to the home again and obtained the address she had written from. I was given an address in Edinburgh Scotland and also the helpful piece of information that she has married and hence changed her name to McFarden. The address was wrong but hoping that the family might still be in the area I searched the telephone directory again. I came up with several and the first one I tried turned out to be a relation of Florence. She put me in touch with Florence's daughter, Jeane, Florence had passed away in 1977.
September this year (2001), my granny (also called Florence) and Jeane, who are cousins, there mothers were sister's, meet for the first time.
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