Publishing Company Blog | In search of the source of my family

Written By Unknown on Sunday, February 1, 2015 | 3:53 AM

After she was diagnosed with cancer, Katharine Norbury had to put together a family medical history, but as an adopted child knew it would be tough. Then, after discovering that her birth mother lived close to the place where the Severn rises, she decided to make a pilgrimage…

In the summer of 2011, my daughter, Evie, and I decided to make a pilgrimage to the source of the Severn. We had started following watercourses upstream towards their source as a holiday project two years earlier. We had planned to recreate a journey made by the Scottish writer Neil M Gunn and follow the Dunbeath Water in Scotland to its source. But our intention was interrupted when I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer. Months of treatment slowed our walks, modified and pared them, sometimes, to a few hundred metres. The cancer brought with it other challenges. I felt a need to put together a medical history of my family and yet I had been adopted as a very small child. So now, prompted by this new and unexpected turn of events, I set about discovering my birth family. My friend Caradoc, who was also an adoptee, suggested I talk to Ariel Bruce, an independent social worker who specialised in reuniting families. During the long summer holiday, Ariel traced my birth mother to a town in mid-Wales and wrote to her. Ariel explained that she was researching the genealogy of a client and had reason to believe that we were related.

Evie and I were on our way home from our holiday cottage on the Llyn peninsula. Ariel had still not had a reply to the letter she had sent, but I noticed that our route back to London passed very close to my birth mother’s village, which in turn was near the source of the Severn.