With a bit of fortitude, some technological know-how and a pinch of good luck, an Australian man has traced his family tree back to two illustrious Prince George families.
David James Tapping, along with a handful of family members in tow, have spent the last couple weeks catching up with the likes of Jeanette and Michael Knell and an assortment of other relatives around the province.
"It's like a reunion, even though we've never met," he said during a visit to the Citizen office.
When he was as young as 10 years old, and still living in England, Tapping had heard stories about a great uncle, George, who in 1911 left the family's home community of Fulham in southwest London to work on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway.
That he was one of passengers on the first train to cross the then new steel bridge spanning the Fraser in 1914 is something of note in itself, but George Tapping is probably best known for building the Parklands Tourist Camp on the shore of Cluculz Lake in the early 1940s.
Tapping Road along a portion of the lake's north shore and Tapping Street in the Pinewood neighbourhood is named after him according to the book "Street Names of Prince George - Our History."
Now middle aged, David and his family moved to Adelaide in 2005, following in the path of a cousin who had also moved to the city on Australia's south coast and acting on a desire he had since he was a teen. His parents followed a few years later on a retirement visa.
The thought of getting a better look at where that other wing of his family had gone took hold a few years ago when Tapping was looking for something to occupy his time.
"My wife said to me 'why don't you read, why don't you sit down and read?'" he said. "I said 'well, I never liked reading books but I wouldn't mind doing the ancestry thing as a bit of a sideline hobby' - and that was it, I just got hooked on it."
What followed was a 2 1/2-year process enabled by such services as Ancestry.com, Google and Facebook. That George Tapping never had children posed a bit of a challenge, but four sisters also emigrated to British Columbia.
One of them was Alice, who followed her husband Percy Knell to Prince George in 1947 and eventually established a construction company that built homes, industrial buildings and even some Dairy Queens, while also raising Peter and Joan. A road Percy Knell built in the Hart still holds his name.
David Tapping's break came when he found a story online about the couple's 50th wedding anniversary. He went through the relatives who attended, placed them in the family tree, figured out where they were living and then turned to Facebook.
"I thought 'what are the chances?,'" Tapping said. "There can be only so many Knells in that area."
He sent messages to Michael and Jeanette Knell, the grandchildren of Percy and Alice and they became his first point of contact. He also got in touch with Christine Clemson, the daughter of Gladys Tapping, another of George Tapping's sisters who settled in Prince George.
None of the Knells knew they had relatives in Prince George until David reached out.
Exploration Place was also credited as a valuable resource. Peter Knell had donated a large collection of large-format negatives to the museum that predated Exploration Place but not long afterwards, it burned down. Fortunately about 25 to 30 of the negatives survived and were posted online.
"For me that was like striking gold," David Tapping said.
For David Tapping's father, Brian, it amounted to a 60-year wait to come out to meet the family.
"I gave my son a bit of information, what my father gave me, but he did the actual (work)," he said.
In turn, his son credited modern-day innovations like the world wide web.
"I had technology at my fingertips," David Tapping said.
Their visit has been occupied primarily with visiting the sites of note, piecing together their collective histories and pouring over photographs - lots of photographs.
In the course of his research, David Tapping noticed a theme running through both wings of the family. Like their parents did, Jeanette and Mike Knell run a construction company while George Tapping was a noted bricklayer who also branched out into the sheet metal business before building Parkland.
"I'm a tradesman, I'm an electrician by trade and we all come from a long line of tradesman," he said and noted the generations going further back were all farmers. "We were never going to be doctorates or solicitors or anything like that, we all come from construction, we're all builders."
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