Blog #2 – The Lost Fifty-Seven

In my first blog, I admitted I was not a professional genealogist.  I did, however, assert that I’m curious about family history, both my own and others. 

I’m very curious about a family mystery that has occupied the imaginations of my family members since 1968.  That is the year that my grandfather died, taking with him the missing first fifty-seven years of his secretive life.

You may wonder how such a length of time can be kept a secret.  I wondered myself whenever I heard the stories.  Here’s what I was told.

Alfred Victor Williams arrived in Vancouver in 1947 as a fifty-seven year-old salesman presumably ready for a clean start.  Immediately, he took a room at the Toronto Boarding Houses at 789 East Hastings Street, recognizable today as the Astoria Hotel, a rundown, single-room occupancy in a low-income part of town.  It was there that my eventual fate was sealed when my grandfather met a chambermaid new to the big city.  Elizabeth Zelbel, my future grandmother, was a German immigrant, some twenty-six years his junior, who’d recently relocated from her family orchard in the pastoral setting of interior British Columbia.  One year later my father, Donald Roy Williams, was born, followed by my Aunt Shirley in 1950. 

While my grandfather’s past was uncertain, his later years were not.  Despite marital breakdown and alcoholism, he remained in his modest Vancouver bungalow for his remaining years occupied predominantly with sales jobs in the print industry, boxing matches on the radio and frequent trips to the Fraser Arms Hotel for bottles of Lamb’s rum. 

When he did pass, he left behind an estranged wife as well as my father and aunt, twenty and eighteen years respectively, and what would account for our family mystery. 

He had successfully kept his first fifty-seven years a complete secret.

Whether he overtly refused to divulge or simply avoided the subject of his first fifty-seven years, his secret life seemed lost forever. 

He did, however, leave a few clues.  I was provided with three documents, one letter and four photos from which I could begin my investigation.  It’s these clues that I’m relying on to discover this family mystery and learn what my grandfather was doing during this time.  Did he raise a family?  Had he served in the military?  Had he served time in prison?  These are the answers I am hoping to find with the clues remaining.

Two of my most intriguing leads?  The photo of an unknown child and a secret identity.