It is fair to say Mrs May Webber didn’t have an easy start in life. When she was seven years old, just three months after her mother had passed away as a result of a brain tumour, she was orphaned when her father died from the tuberculosis he contracted while serving in the trenches during World War I. She was then legally adopted by her uncle but sadly she was “tormented and bullied” by her aunt. The outbreak of World War 2 saw her evacuated to Ascot in Surrey where she remained for a number of years after the War. But having left Peckham in south east London at such a young age, Mrs Webber lost contact with her three sisters and brother who, as a result of being much older than her, had already left home when their parents had died. Things started to look up for her while she was working as a nanny in Pwllheli, Gwynedd, for that was when she met her first husband David Williams and settled down in Port Talbot. But she was widowed in 1984. She remarried in 1987 to Geoff Webber only to be widowed again 10 years later. Fast forward to 2017 and after more than 80 years, the 90 year old’s long lost family from Peckham has been found. It is all down to the efforts of Ms Angela Doyle, a relative and keen genealogist, who spent seven years trawling the internet and public records for Mrs Webber’s siblings, Alice, Mary, Nellie and Edward. The breakthrough came when Ms Doyle left a message on an ancestry website asking for anyone who had any information to get in touch. It turned out there was, as Ms Doyle explains: “As luck would have it, her sisters’ family were also searching and found my message, so they got in touch”, she said. “The only sadness of it was that we were too late to reunite May with her brother and sisters.” Alice, 102, and Nellie, 100, died within six weeks of each other just two years earlier, while both Mary and Edward had passed away in the 1970s. However Ms Doyle did get in touch with Alice’s daughters, Elaine Lewis, 76, and Margaret Wellington, 73, Mrs Lewis’ daughter, Kay Lewis, 48, all from Portsmouth, Hampshire, and Mary’s daughter, Ann May, from Sidcup, Kent, all of whom made the trip to Wales to meet Mrs Webber for the first time. Speaking before the reunion, Mrs Webber said: “We will have so much to talk about. There’s so much I want to know about my sisters and brother and I hope they will be able to fill in the 83 blank years. But I do have feelings of sadness too. I had a very unhappy childhood and my way of dealing with it ever since has been to put it out of my mind as best I could and to put all my energies into creating a loving, happy home for my three sons. So for 80-odd years, I’ve done my best not to live in the past and now that past is right here. I have had mixed feelings about the get-together, if I’m honest, but my family has convinced me this is the right thing to do and I do of course have so many questions I want to ask them.” Here’s to many more happy family get togethers Mrs Webber.
