It is thought that the family of Joseph Moise Ades, father of the depositor, had been resident in Aleppo, Syria, for more than a thousand years. It was either in Aleppo or Alexandria, where the family later settled, that Joseph was born in 1874. He came to Liverpool,  England around 1908 where he began trading in imported cotton and eggs.

He met his wife, Sophie Epstein, whilst a lodger at her mother's house and they married at Princes Road Synagogue. 

The Epstein family came from Horodetz, in Belarus, west of Warsaw. Sophie Epstein's father, Asher, was a tailor and came to England around 1887. He settled in Cardiff and his wife, Sarah followed a couple of years later. She brought two small sons with her and had to cross borders without the correct documents.

Sophie Epstein, the donor's mother, was born in Cardiff, the eldest of four girls. There were also four boys. 

The donor, Estelle, was born in Liverpool in 1922, the youngest of 3 sisters. Their mother died when she was eight so she was brought up by her grandmother and mother's sisters. Meanwhile, her father was recuperating in a clinic in Le Vesinet, France, from a breakdown. He was visited there every year by his brothers from Alexandria.

When Estelle and an elder sister went to visit their father in 1940, they were caught up in the melee of the Nazi occupation and managed to get separated from their father, who went back to Paris to search for them but must have been captured and subsequently ended up in various camps and was ultimately deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

See the collection for a more detailed family history.