Wedding album
Missing pieces
May 5, 1943: just married! My parents’ wedding album shows them posing proudly in a lush Durban garden—dad and his best man in their starched army uniforms, mum and bridesmaid resplendent in their white net gowns. But beneath the glamour, this album is the cipher of family secrets.
The album includes several shots on the steps of the church, but surprisingly none of them show the elders in full view. Some reveal Grandfather Samuel Roach’s face looming from the shadow of the church portico and others give glimpses of an older man and woman. The paternal grandparents missing from our lives?
This album first surfaced when my brother Peter and I were clearing out our mother’s Durban flat after her death in 1992. After paging though the album I put it on the pile to send to my sister Jane in Sydney Australia where she had lived for the past 15 years.
It later became a topic of many telephone conversations. Jane thought that the only elders who attended the wedding were Grandfather Samuel and Great-grandmother Eliza-Jane. When Jane had asked mum for an explanation, she was told: “Oh darling, it was a war wedding”.
I next see the album on a visit to Sydney, 20 years later. A yellow stain has crept across the pages, and the cover is coming adrift, but the images are still quite clear. There are several different angles of the same group shot that reveal more of the faces of both my grandfathers—assuming that the jolly rotund man is my paternal grandfather (aka Grandad). There is even one that shows grandad with a ghostly figure who may even be my paternal grandmother—she of no name.
Now Jane remembers that it was just our maternal grandmother, Mabel Roach, who boycotted the wedding on account of her disapproval of my father. When my siblings were in their teens, granny had sat them down and told them a thing or two about our dad. She said he was a bad lot and that marrying him was the worst decision my mother had ever made. This was when she explained that our surname was really Lazarus, and dad was secretly Jewish.
I too had learned my true identity from granny, who broke the news during an ordinary family dinner when I was sixteen years of age. I realised immediately why a family friend repeatedly questioned me about my father’s nickname. I used to laugh, “They called him Lazy because he was a lazy sort of guy.” She laughed too. Apparently, I was the last in Durban to know.
Disappearing grandad
So, what can we know about the progenitor of this secret surname?
The only memory I have of Grandad involves visiting his flat with my family on Christmas day when I was about eight years old. His wife Irene gave each of us kids a cellophane packet of home-made pink, white and green coconut ice. It was hot and uncomfortable, and I wanted to go home. Mum was annoyed. (They could have forked out for a decent present for the children.).
Apparently, Irene disapproved of us. When I was older, mum told me that Irene always had a headache when they were supposed to visit us. Eventually they stopped coming around altogether, and we stopped going there.
My sister remembered earlier days when Grandad was a regular visitor to our home. He once brought her a beautiful dolls’ house, but she didn’t know what happened to it. He was already married to Irene by then, so perhaps he and dad fell out when dad changed his surname from Lazarus to Lawson. This was something he decided with his half-brother, Wilfred, who was experiencing anti-Semitism that was holding back his business ambitions.
Shadows
I don’t recall seeing this album during my childhood. Was I just uninterested or was it hidden away to conceal the missing parent/s? Or to hide the newspaper cutting about the happy day that was pasted at the back, the caption with the secret surname, Lazarus?
Looking at the album with a critical eye I speculate that the photographer could have even been unaware that the elders would not render as visible on the negatives. Although a professional studio was engaged, perhaps they lacked the skills or materials to deal with the contrasty light of a Durban sunny day?
My attempts to interpret the wedding album speak volumes about family history research. You think you are joining the dots, but those dots may just be artefacts of history. Somewhere between the false memories and the hearsay, between the faulty images and the silence, lies the truth of your ancestry