Book Club

November 2024: The Search for My Abandoned Grandmother by Mary Ames Mitchell. The author, a member of MCGS, describes the book on her website: “Bitten by the genealogy bug after researching my father’s family, I begin looking into the life of my maternal grandmother, Eileen Thomas Hopkins. Eileen had died someplace in Great Britain in 1933 at age 41, when my mother, Betty May Hopkins, was only eight. Mom’s father, Prynce Hopkins, quickly replaced Eileen with Mom’s stepmother, who bristled at any mention of her predecessor. My grandfather, a wealthy American, brought my mom and the stepmother to California in 1939, when the Germans began bombing their home in London. By the time I was doing my research in 2000, no one knew where my grandmother Eileen had died or was buried. No one knew what happened to her parents after Mom left England. In this book, I journal my trip to England to meet my English cousins and find my grandmother’s grave. I also transcribe parts of my grandfather Prynce’s old journals in which he described courting Eileen and their marriage. The mystery is, someone vandalized the journals, cutting out the details about my grandmother’s death.”