AN appeal for information about her family's former home yielded some unexpected responses for a reader from Nottingham.

Wendy Williams contacted the Advertiser about a house she believed to be called Honeysuckle Cottage, where her grandfather Wilfred Cartwright had lived during his very early days.

Not only did Wendy discover that the house still exists, she also established contact with a relative she never knew existed.

"I had a phone call from a lovely lady called Rachel Pitt," said Wendy.

"Her husband is a builder, and he recognised the cottage straight away, even though it has had some structural alterations and now has a different name.

"It is on the road to Kidderminster, at Rocks Green.

"Rachel was kind enough to send me a photograph she had taken, and there are still some architectural features which are unmistakable.

"The house has been rendered on the outside, the gate is no longer in the middle of the hedge, the windows have been replaced and so has the porch.

"However you can tell from all kinds of little architectural details that it is the same place, like the facts that there is just one chimney on the right, then there are the unusual ridge tiles and style of the brickwork round the gable, and only the one central window upstairs.

"I looked up my grandad's birth certificate, and the clincher is that he was born at Rocks Green, almost certainly in that house.

"It was wonderful to solve the mystery!

"Rachel tells me that she and her husband are both from local families, going back generations, and it is quite possible that our families would have known each other."

While the house now has a new name, the cottage next door is still called Daffodil Cottage and set Wendy wondering about the frequency of floral names in her family, and whether that's connected in some way to the house names.

"My second cousin Andrew and I visited Ludlow on a nostalgia trip," she said. "His mother is called Iris and, in our grandparents' generation, apart from Violet and Rose who survived, there were Lily and Daisy who did not."

In addition to news about Honeysuckle Cottage, there was also some unexpected family information.

"I received a letter from someone called Stanley Williams from Ludlow, saying that he used to play at Honeysuckle Cottage when he was a boy," said Wendy.

"He didn't know if it was still standing.

"Like my great grandfather William Cartwright, his grandmother Eliza Cartwright originally came from Ditton Priors.

"It seems very likely that they were cousins and so it appears I may have found a distant relative.

"Stanley was a waterways inspector and is nearly 84."

The whole sequence of events has served to restore and reinvigorate the connection Wendy's family feels with the Ludlow area.

"The family also lived in Lower Galdeford and Corve Street in the early years of the 20th century but moved to Birmingham just before the First World War because of a shortage of work in the Ludlow area," said Wendy.

"They were clearly in an ever decreasing downward spiral of poverty, unemployment and hunger. By 1911 they were no longer doing agricultural work, and both Wilfred and his father William were working in a quarry, presumably in Clee Hills: I have no idea how they would have got there every day, but I am sure that must have been very hard and thankless work.

"The family was still very poor when they moved to Birmingham, but eventually managed to pull themselves up by dint of sheer hard work.

"My grandfather was a lovely, good, kind man, the sort of person who never had a bad word to say about anyone. Ludlow was always his spiritual home.

"I am immensely proud of my family and all that they overcame. Numerous family members still live in the Birmingham area, but regardless of where we are settled now, we all come back to visit Ludlow."