Micaela Vilarelle Rey arrived in Liverpool from the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela in Spain's North West Atlantic region of Galicia. Her Alien Registration document, issued during the First World War, gives her date of arrival in Liverpool as 1904 and her address at that time as 12 Liver Street. In the 1901 census this property is listed as a Boarding House for seamen.

What brought young Spanish women to Liverpool in the early 1900s? For many, emigration would be for economic reasons, but research shows that Micaela’s journey to Liverpool was undoubtedly prompted by a double tragedy back home in Spain – the ‘push’ factor, since a job in a seamen’s boarding house in a strange country could hardly be described as the ‘pull’ factor. Some time after her arrival, Micaela met José Viñas Novo, a Galician seaman working for the Larrinaga Shipping Company, and they married in 1907 (the photograph on the left shows Micaela and José, probably on their wedding day).

Micaela’s future life in Liverpool would be in sad contrast to the one she left behind as the eldest daughter of Don José Vilarelle Vázquez and Doña Encarnación Mateo Caneiro – respected and well-to-do citizens of Santiago de Compostela. An announcement in a Santiago newspaper celebrating her parents’ Golden Wedding in 1930, describes… ‘[her father] an illustrious painter from Santiago who has acquired so many plaudits for his creations in Galicia and overseas, and [her mother] are both beloved and appreciated by all the social classes of Santiago, as are their children’. A notice in another newspaper in 1925, announces the engagement of one of Micaela’s sisters, ‘the beautiful and distinguished young lady from Santiago…’ to a ‘learned and distinguished scholar…’ Meanwhile in Liverpool, Micaela’s husband could neither read nor write.

In 1945, the Santiago newspaper El Compostelano’s obituary to Micaela’s mother is fulsome in its praise, describing her as ‘…a kind-hearted person who enjoyed general admiration, for which reason her death is greatly felt in all sectors of the population, as will be clear tomorrow at the funeral and burial…’. The newspaper sends its ‘…deepest sympathy, especially [to] her son…a competent artist, resident for many years in Buenos Aires…’

There is no mention in any newspaper reports of the couple’s eldest daughter, who had also lived abroad for many years, although photographs have survived which prove that as her younger siblings grew up, they still remembered the big sister who had left Spain when they were children. One, dated 1925, is a studio portrait of two brothers, taken in Buenos Aires, and dedicated to their ‘dear sister and the brother-in-law we will never meet’. Their only means of contact being by letter, in the 46 years she lived in Liverpool Micaela, like most immigrants at the time, would never again see the faces, or hear the voices, of the loved ones she had left behind. Liverpool-born children of immigrants must also have felt isolated. In a city where large, extended families lived in close proximity, Micaela and José’s surviving children would grow up without knowing grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins; torn between the culture and language their parents strove to retain and the reality of life in Liverpool.

Micaela was 68 years of age, and a widow in Liverpool, when her mother died in Santiago de Compostela in 1945. Re-housed from the slums, but still living in poverty and coping with harrowing family circumstances, it is probable that she kept her difficulties a secret from her family in Spain. Did pride prevent her from asking for help? After a life of hardship and loss in Liverpool, Micaela died less than five years after her mother, but the two burials could not have been more different. In her mother’s funeral cortege were ‘…full representations of all the sectors of [Santiago], showing plainly…the general sympathy enjoyed by the deceased and her family.’ Micaela died as she had lived, in obscurity; no newspaper mourned her passing or sent condolences to her family. She is buried in a Liverpool cemetery, in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Micaela was my much loved grandmother. After researching her early life in Spain for the past 14 years, I am extremely grateful to Kirsty, whose meticulous research recently discovered the above-mentioned newspaper articles – and who also translated them for me.

J Carmen Smith tells her grandmother's story in Chasing Shadows: A Journey into the Past and the Secrets it Holds, available as an ebook from http://www.jcarmensmith.com/.