Having gathered a lot of verbal clues, where did I go from here?  If my father was killed in action as Mum said, what was the use of searching?  If the story of his death was true, surely her family would have known.

It was about this time that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission had made details of the war dead available via the internet.  I searched the site and there were no Starnes (or similar spellings).  Was mother telling what she thought was the truth, was she painting a better picture of the situation for me, or did she not want me to know something?  These and thousands of other questions were going through my head.   If nobody had heard of his death and he survived the war, getting a friend to write the "killed in action" letter, would enable Gerry to return to his wife and family in Canada.  A happy ending for him.

Looking at the evidence, especially Mum's story about seeing his divorce papers — why would a Canadian soldier going to war, carry his divorce papers half way around the world with him?  My thoughts were now that he survived the war and I would start a search.  Where do you start to look for someone you know so little about and with so little information?  Having asked the family for their memories, I tried to find details of Canadian troops in Chipstead.  I found a most interesting book written by a local man, Fred Little.  He tells of three Canadian regiments camped in the woods at Chipstead, the Toronto Scottish, the Saskatoon Light Infantry and the Royal Canadian Regiment.  Asking my relatives, the Saskatoon Light Infantry seemed to get more votes.  My uncles remembered seeing the soldiers in tents, looking at the big guns (which they thought were anti-aircraft guns), and going to films in the nissen huts.

I later read a book about the search for a wartime GI father.  The author was one of thousands of children fathered by foreign troops in England and Holland.  Perhaps I was not as unique as I had thought.  The author told the story of her search and meeting her father and his American family.  I thought "It can be done — I will do it".  Following my request, she gave me details of a couple in Holland who had set up a tracing organisation called "Project Roots".  I contacted them — yes, they would help me in my search.  I sent them as much detail as I had.  This information was put on the World Wide Web and they also started a search with their contacts in Canada.  This was July 1999.

I then wrote to various Canadian government departments requesting information on soldiers who served in England from late 1941 and were sent to Europe in the summer of 1944.  Due to the Canadian privacy laws they could give me no help at all.  Looking at war books I learnt that thousands of Canadian troops were sent from England to Italy in the summer of 1944 but I could not find any mention of the regiments that were stationed in Chipstead at the appropriate time.

By now it was January 2001  and I was sorry to hear that Project Roots has made no progress.  I then heard of another tracing organisation called The Association of Liberation Children.   I contacted the Canadian representative in Ontario and was sent a questionnaire asking details such as what was his cap badge, what colour were his shoulder flashes, and did he wear a beret or a forage cap.  My uncles helped me with these details but repeated that they thought his surname was Starnes — perhaps the Canadian accent made it sound like Staines.  However, I believed my mother and put Staines on the form and sent it back and kept my fingers crossed.  This was to cause me months of delay.

At this time — working on the theory that Gerry had not been killed in the war, I took the ring which was sent to my mother, to a jeweller.  I thought perhaps the ring was bought in Europe and if it had been, it could have been bought just to send to my mother.   It was confirmed as being American gold — so was probably purchased in Canada before Gerry left for England.