What happens when you have a personal connection to a news story?

While the Independent's news team covered the Windrush scandal, I was completely ignorant of the fact that a member of my own family had been on the HMS Windrush itself

When the Windrush scandal erupted earlier this year – bringing down the former home secretary Amber Rudd in its wake – I did not for a second think that I had any personal link to the story. And when I went to visit the British Library’s Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land exhibition with my family at the beginning of the summer, I still had no idea we might have any connection to the passenger liner which has become synonymous with post-war immigration of West Indian people to the UK.

We had simply gone along to support my sister who had helped curate the exhibition and to learn more about the historical, cultural and political significance of Caribbean migration to Britain 70 years after the ship arrived.

A few weeks later, we were shocked to discover my great-uncle was aboard HMS Windrush itself in 1948.

My sister Naomi uncovered the fact from a tiny clipping in a Jamaican newspaper. The newspaper cutting has a photo of my great uncle Herbert Zayne (my grandmother’s maiden name) under a headline which says: “He Brought An English Wife”.

“Herbert Zayne. Jamaican house-painter with his English wife – formerly Irene Blain, of Blackpool – and their children Fay and David in the Empire Windrush on her arrival at Tilbury June 22 with 450 people from Jamaica who have come to look for work here,” the short article reads. “Mr and Mrs Zayne met when he was in the RAF over here and she was a WAAF.”

We knew that Joyce Elisser Norris, my Lebanese-Jamaican granny who is now 90, came to Britain carrying just two trunks of clothes, books and other belongings to become a nurse here in 1948, the same year as Herbert Zayne. Sadly, she now has Alzheimer’s and sometimes struggles to remember why she is in England or exactly who I am.

My sister and I were able to lap up her history throughout our childhoods, devouring her delicious food which is an amalgamation of Jamaican and Lebanese cuisines and listening to her stories about growing up in Jamaica. Now begins the real work in piecing together our family tree.

Rarely do you come across a story in the newsroom that connects with your own family history – but luckily, a journalistic background also gives you the exact tools you need to further investigate your ancestry. I was able to memorialise some of that in an article for The Independent recently, and relished the opportunity to look further into the lives of my relatives who, alongside more than 1,000 others (plus two stowaways), made that famous journey after the Second World War.

Yours,

Maya Oppenheim​

Women’s correspondent