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Family History 21st June 2007 BMD Indexes
I had been researching my mother's side for
several years.

She came from French Huguenot stock and with an unusual name of Le Surf. I wrote to everyone in the country with that name.

The name had been corrupted over the years from the original Le Cerf to Le Serf and then Le Surf/Lesurf.
I felt that many of these families were connected
somehow and collected all entries of the name with all its variants hoping to collate the families eventually.

I had many interesting replies although,
understandably, not everyone wanted to know about their own family history, let alone mine.

However, one day I received a telephone call from
a 24 year old man who asked if I could put him in touch with his mother.

He said he had tried to find her through the telephone directories and had telephoned many people with the same name, most of whom gave him my name
and number to contact.

He was rather reluctant to give me any information
as to why he needed this information but I felt I could not give out details to anyone who asked.

Eventually, this rather upset young man told me that he had been adopted as a young baby. He was now getting married to a girl who had a young son and
this made him feel that he needed to find his
birth mother.

I explained to him that his mother may not want to be contacted for one reason or another. In fact, I did not have his mother's address but I was in contact with her aunts, uncles and cousins.

I took his details and said I would try for him but it had to be his mother who decided whether or not
she met her son again.

I contacted her uncle and explained the situation
and asked that the information be passed on to the young man's mother.

About ten days later, I received another telephone
call from this young man- this time he sounded very excited. He said he was overjoyed and that in two hours' time he was to meet his mother again and that he had two sisters coming to meet him as well.

I was so pleased that my fascinating hobby of family history research had such a fantastic, worthwhile outcome.

Patricia Hearn

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