The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 51 No.4 | March 2025

Member’s article

‘What could I do? What could I do?’ wailed my grandfather William CROSS to his parents after his attempts to remove his younger sister Daisy from the London bound train at Colchester Station had ended in failure. It was 2nd August 1912 and a 21 year old, Daisy Alice Maud Cross was travelling alone intent on reaching Canada. Her journey had started at her home town of Ipswich and was much against her parents’ wishes. As their eldest son was working down the tracks at Colchester at the time, they had instructed him to intercept the train when it stopped and to remove his sister by whatever means possible. However, despite being just 4 foot 10 inches tall, Daisy had resisted all her brother’s efforts and continued her journey to London and thence to Liverpool Docks. Here, she boarded the ‘ Lake Manitoba ’ and 10 days later disembarked in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A three day train journey on the Canadian Northern Railway followed until she reached the end of the line in Alberta where she had previously arranged her accommodation and work as a chambermaid in a small hotel. This was all I knew about my great aunt. There were apocryphal family tales about the winter snow being piled so high she couldn’t open her front door and of wolves roaming the back garden seeking food but nothing of any substance. Daisy never returned to England and her role in my family history remained incomplete. It was then I recalled the oft-heard lament amongst amateur family historians wishing they’d asked more questions when they had the chance but now had nobody left to ask. Tracing Miss Daisy

Fortunately, in my case, there was someone. Uncle Harold Cross was 95 years old and living in a care home in the town of Felixstowe, overlooking the North Sea. He was my father’s brother, the youngest of William’s six children and the only one still alive. As with many folk of advanced years, he couldn’t remember what he’d done the previous day but his mind was still sharp when it came to events long ago. I got into the habit of visiting Harold with a list of 10 questions, all family-related. These I would slip into the general conversation about the weather and the passing container ships and surreptitiously record his answers. I realised Harold was born two years after Daisy emigrated so wouldn’t have known his aunt personally. However, he never married and had lived with his parents till they died. There was the chance he might have picked up a few snippets of information about Daisy so I gently approached the subject. Harold revealed that the year after she arrived in Canada, Daisy had married a man named Harry BULLOCK and they had five children. When pushed further, Harold could only come up with a name I interpreted as Kit Cody. This he repeated several times. I knew the real name of the well-known frontiersman Buffalo Bill was William Cody and the internet revealed he had a son named Kit. I couldn’t see the connection. However, things took a sudden turn when I mentioned Kit Cody to my nephew Martin, also a keen family historian. Martin’s wife Clare is from Ontario and it didn’t take them long to discover Harold probably hadn’t meant Kit Cody at all but Kitscoty, a tiny settlement in Central Alberta. Was this the

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