As it was told earlier I have got a part of my family in England. Zosia (Zoe) is daughter of my uncle, brother of my father. She emigrated illegaly from Poland ca 1947, after her husband had got sentence to death from communist regime and had to escape. She succeded to escape too with her young daughter to England hidden under the deck of a bulkship in a coalcargo exported from Poland. She left in Poland her second daughter who emigrated from Poland some years later.
Zoe lived in England together with her daughter Hania, and another daughter, Jasia, lived with her husband Tim. They all three were unusually clever at sowing their clothes and mostly at everything, inclusive computers! And gardening, of course, but that was Zoe who was head-gardener. Hania and Jasia are dataprogrammers.
Zoe was a very wise woman besides of all. She knew how to live and I try to learn this from her.. But, unfortunately, Zoe is not alive any more. She died in 2005. It was very sorrow and heavy loss for me..
It was Zoe´s daughter Jasia who has discovered my familys history - when she worked for a University library at some archive papers.
She has found there some very old letters from a woman who lived in Poland in the 17nth century and she was French. She wrote letters to France, to her relatives and described what had happened to her. Her name, de Feydos, sounded similarly to my fathers name - namely Fidos.
My family name is certainly not Polish and it is very seldom used in Poland. We always wondered where it came from. My father had some guess about that - because he had heard from his father a story about some old documents that was found during restoration of the palace nearby, where a Polish aristocrat family named Dembinski lived. Among documents were also letters from France to a French lady who lived in the palace. But my dad has never seen them with own eyes and he did not know about name likeness. Together with letters was also a ring found, ring with the escutcheon which did not belong to this Polish aristocrats family.
Jasia, Zoe's daughter, found from all those very old documents in English library many information what was lacking to puzzled out whole the exciting family history. You can ask why documents were found in England instead of in France?
That was because of many wars between France and England. Documents were brought to England among other war plunderings booties.
Anyway a romantic and unusual story was told how a noble birth French woman found herself in Poland, became the resident and the friend to the Polish earl´s family - and the most strange of all - how it happened that she gave the beginning to several generations of my family ! I, and Zoe, her sisters in Poland and her brother in South Africa, several my cousins in Poland as well, all we belong to the eleventh generation after Celestine de Feydos from France, there she used to live in a castle at Loire, in 17-nth century.
If you want to read about Celestine´s fate in France and her travel to Poland, click here:
This page was last updated on: 17 September, 2014
