Family trees are like jigsaws, they are fun to complete and there is always a special sense of satisfaction when finding pieces that unexpectedly fit together or putting in that piece where the pattern did not initially  seem quite right.

So when when a friend at lunch on Sunday gave me a couple of names with which to start, I was delighted to start the puzzle.  As the picture has slowly emerged it has been a surprise to me, and an even greater surprise to him.

One grandmother was Italian, he was already aware of that, and he was unsurprised to find Irish forebears on his father’s side.  There was almost a sense of shock when the background of his grandmother had emerged.

His grandmother had died in 2015, at the age of 88, and to him had seemed much as one would have expected an English grandmother in a midlands town to be.  His memories were of a quiet undemonstrative woman.

When the marriage registers revealed her maiden name to be Teischler, it was something unanticipated.  He contacted his mother.  His grandmother had been born in April 1927 and had left Austria, his mother thought, when she was fourteen.

Looking through records, it seems more likely that his grandmother was only twelve because it seemed likely that she had been from a Jewish family in Vienna. Holocaust records show various people of the name having been transported to Poland.

It seems possible that refuge was found in the midst of the scenery and sedateness of Dorset, which would have been a world apart from the living hell of Eastern Europe, for Frau Teischler was married in 1949 in the town of Blandford Forum.

The first inclination was to search for her name among those who had arrived in England with the kindertransport, the evacuation of some 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Germany and Austria.  However, apart from the 669 children saved through the efforts of Sir Nicholas Winton, there seems no comprehensive list of those children who escaped death in the camps.

It seemed strange that eight-five years after the outbreak of the war there was no accessible database.  A search for an explanation brought the information that neither English nor German governments had been inclined to produce a list.  There must surely be a list somewhere, the British would have had to issue identity cards and find billets, someone must have kept a record.

What is the story of Berta Teischler? Someone must know it.