The grandad they never really knew

He died in his fifties, in the middle of the eighties, when his grandchildren were either very small or not yet born. They grew up knowing his name and not much else. There was one photo most of them recognised, a couple of stories that surfaced at Christmas, and almost nothing on film. For a long time, that was all he was to them.

A life in the wrong places

What did exist of him was scattered, and none of it was anywhere you would think to look.

His son, their dad, had a few photos on Facebook, dropped into posts years ago and long since buried under everything that came after. You could find them, but only if you already knew they were there and had an hour to go looking.

His other son, an uncle who loved the family tree, had added a handful of images to a genealogy site, along with the dates and places he had spent years tracking down. It was careful, patient work. It simply lived somewhere no one else in the family ever thought to open.

The rest was in other people's houses. Albums in lofts, a wedding photo in a drawer, stories that had never been asked for. Nothing was truly lost. It was only in the wrong places, and no single place held more than a fragment.

One page to gather it all

One of the grandchildren set up a page for him. It took a few minutes: his name, the one photo everyone knew, the years he was here. Then she sent the link round the family and asked them to add whatever they had.

Her dad moved his Facebook photos across, this time somewhere they would actually be seen. Her uncle brought over the images from the family tree, and with them the story behind each one. An aunt turned up the wedding photo. A cousin remembered him mending a car at the side of a road in the rain, and wrote it down before it could slip away again.

The picture filling in

Bit by bit, a man his grandchildren had never really met began to take shape. Not from one grand account of his life, but from a dozen small ones, each person adding the piece only they had kept.

The brother who could fill a room with laughing. The dad who worked long hours and still turned up to the football. The face behind that one familiar photo, now surrounded by others.

None of them had the whole story. Together, they had him.

There was still almost no video, and the photos were still far from many. But gathered in one place instead of five, the few became enough to know him by.

Somewhere to come back to

Now the grandchildren have somewhere to go. A page that holds everything the family managed to save between them, open for anyone who knew him to add one more thing. One day their own children will look him up, and he will be there waiting, in far more than a single photograph.