Searching for relatives
| Ryan Hynek |
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3
Wed 4 May 2022, 08:42 Hello group. I have a bit of a challenge and the folks at the Nostalgic Oxford FB page put me on to your group for potential help. In 1997, I was a student at St. Clare's Oxford and I was assigned to interview several WWII POWs and their wives who lived in Oxford. I ended up interviewing three couples and, while I never did edit the project into the planned radio story, I did recently find the old audio cassettes of the interviews in their entirety. I was just a teen, so my questions weren't very hard hitting, but I believe the stories these couples told of how they met, the harrowing tale of how he was captured, and their happy reunions after the war would be treasured by any surviving family members. I find the tapes especially touching as the couples all joked and teased each other throughout the interviews but also spoke of how deeply lucky they were to have each other. I have digitized the recordings and can happily provide them to anyone who would like a copy, but my main goal is to track down living family members... and this is where I am stuck. I wonder if anyone in this group might know these couples or their families so that I could get these recordings to them. I will list the names, but I need to add a caveat, I only addressed the interviewees by their surnames in the recordings, so the following names are what I pieced together from random notes I had or how I heard them address each other in the tapes. This means, I cannot be 100% sure I have their first names correct. I believe they are: 1. William (Bill) and Marjorie Harris 2. Denis Harry Merry and Joan Winifred Merry (Smart) 3. Ted and Barbara Perkins They all lived in Oxford in 1997. I have found one of the daughters of Ted and Barbara through a published obituary and given her the audio files, but I am hitting a wall with the Harris' and the Merry's. According to the tapes, William and Marjorie spoke about a daughter named Catherine. Any help uniting these families with the voices of their parents or grandparents would be so appreciated! (apologies if you see this post in other groups you are also members of) |