Some ancestors arrive in the records neatly labelled. Others come with a puzzle attached. My great-grandfather Fred Foster began life with a different surname altogether. He was born Frederick Allenby, the son of a man who, for now, has all but vanished from the paper trail. The story of how Frederick Allenby became Fred Foster is really the story of the women who raised him, and of a family that was hit again and again by loss yet kept going. A birth in Darlington Frederick