Carta de Bastien Gomperts a Víctor Seruya
from Professor B D Gomperts
31 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QS
0171 602 2907 / b. gomperts@ucl.ac.uk
3 January. 1999
Dear Victor and Maria
I hope that this letter finds you both alive and well, and I hope too that you remember who I am, and your visit at our house some ??20?? years ago! I certainly recall that we spent a very happy summer evening together
My wife (Zerin) and I have just spent a few days in Derbyshire together with Eleanor (my aunt) and Michael Barratt Brown. My mother, Barbara, died last February aged 89 and so this leaves only Eleanor of the Isabel/David Singer family now alive. With Eleanor now 95, our visits there are very precious occasions. She really is very old, in every sense of the word, and there can be no chance that she will be venturing far from her home any more. Michael, who is 15 years her junior looks after with real loving care which is wonderful to behold.
With the death of my mother I came across some photographs of our common Seruya ancestors These were contained in an envelope on which my grandmother Isabel (Daisy) had labelled with the words “my grandparents”. Maybe you already have these pictures but my hope is that you may also possess some more and might be prepared to lend them to me so that I could make some copies (very easy now with the computer). You will notice that I have several photos of old Mrs Seruya. One of these, taken in Brighton shows her quite youthful, and I would estimate that it must date from the 1850’s, if not earlier. Another, plump, middle aged, was taken in Paris I have none of her husband, my great-great grandfather. If you have photographs, and can bare to let me have them for a short time, I would like to make some copies and I promise to return them very quickly. If the original photographs are damaged, it is sometimes possible for me to repair them to some extent, making them more presentable.
How are we related? I was recently given the family tree computer soft-ware and a huge amount of information about our family by Janet Motherwell, the granddaughter daughter of my great-aunt Alice (elder sister of Isabel Daisy). I was able to add a lot of further detail about the family Pyke: Charlotte Pyke was the wife of Rabbi Simeon Singer, so no relative of yours. But where do you fit in? My guess is that our common ancestor has to be the father of Ledicia Seruya, who married Stephen Hart Isaac, my great-grand father the dreamy looking young man in the pictures). I have her name as both Sime and as Ledicia. Am I correct in assuming that S is a diminutive of L? Her youngest daughter, my great aunt, was always called Sime and took the surname Seruya although her father was Isaac.
When you look at the tree, you will see that we are now grand parents, 4 times over and that sadly, we lost out youngest daughter, killed, almost 10 years ago, in a shooting incident on the border of Pakistan and Afganistan (Khyber Pass). The tree doesn’t tell you that I shall retire in 2½ years time from my job as professor in the Physiology department at University College London (I recall that you were a student at King’s?). Nor does it tell you that our daughter
Natasha ran a wonderful dance company for about 10 years and is now attending art school as a mature student, and that Miranda has a PhD in biochemistry and does research in developmental biology.
One of the problems of these family trees is the lack of interesting information. Mainly, the people who compile them are only interested in names, dates and places. Far more interesting from my point of view would be to know what our ancestors did with their lives and when I get some time, I shall certainly add what ever detail I can find. Someone else has also presented me with a copy of my father’s (Gomperts) family tree which goes right back to the 16 century.
Again, it is a fairly sterile affair because, with a single exception, there is no information about what all these people did. The exception is Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdy and we don’t need to be told that he wrote a violin concerto and much other wonderful music. He turns out to be my Th cousin, twice removed! My father’s family finds its origins in Emmerich which is on the borders of Germany and the old Spanish Netherlands and so I have been wondering if we might also have Sephardic ancestors, with the name Gomperts being derived from Gomez (or similar).
Zerin suggests that we ought to make a visit to Portugal. I have only been once in Lisboa, at a scientific meeting in about 1967. She has never been there, but like me, she also has cousins. probably out of old Portuguese East Africa. with on greetings and very best wishes
(Assinatura)
If any one of our Portuguese relatives would like to have a copy of the complete computer information, please let me know and I can send a copy of the full tree together with the necessary software