The date is June 6, 2003. In our laps, we have a memoir entry describing events exactly 55 years ago, on June 6, 1948. This was the day that Boris Balinsky’s family arrived in Britain after a year’s separation. He brought his mother, his wife Betty, and his son (my father), John, from London to Edinburgh. Boris had been working here for a year.

Five of us have repeated this journey from London, and our quest this day was to find the house where my grandfather and his family had lived for over a year. My wife Julia, my aunt and uncle, Sylvia and David, my cousin Mike, and I comprise the expedition party (an Expotition, as Pooh would call it).

Our first clue is the street name, “Moston Terrace,” unfortunately without a house number. So the first step is to find an Edinburgh A to Zed. We find one, and discover that it is only about 1/100^th the size of a London A to Zed. To our great relief, Moston Terrace is only 1 block long! So we drive to it, and admire the houses in the beautiful sunshine. Julia learns that a terrace is a street with all the houses touching each other in a long row.

Our next clue is a sheet of photographs that Helen has included with the memoirs. The photographs show Boris’s family walking down the street, presumably near their own house. Another shows 14-year old John mounting a bicycle in front of the terraced houses. From these clues, we are able to narrow it down to the west side of the street. Now we have to figure out which one.

We examine the photographs for clues to architectural details. We notice that there are slight differences in the decorations in the stonework on each house. There are also differences in the height of the retaining walls in the front gardens, in the archways of the doors, and in the peaks of the roofs. It is like one of those puzzles in which you must spot the 5 differences between two nearly identical drawings.

Our other clue is a description from the memoir of the interior layout of the house. They had an apartment, consisting of the four upstairs rooms of a large three-storey terrace. As we can make no more progress from the outside, David encourages us to start knocking on doors. So we begin at one end, and work our way up the street.

What began with a bit of trepidation soon turns into a neighborhood puzzle-solving exercise. We show each person the description and photographs. They help us narrow down the possibilities based on room layouts, and their knowledge of the history of each house. Several houses had been subdivided into apartments, as evidenced by interior door locks. A couple of the owners invite us into their houses, and into the back garden, where an additional clue becomes apparent.

One of the photographs is of my father in his Edinburgh Academy jacket in the back garden. From the back garden, we notice that the old “servant’s quarters” in the back of each house vary in height and in window size. This means that by looking at the roof lines, and the number of rows of bricks, we can further narrow the houses down. One of the owners, looking at the EA jacket, says, “Oh, I have one of those! My son just left the Academy.” She lends us the jacket for a photo of me in the back garden.

Despite all the clues, however, we are unable to narrow it down conclusively to one house. None of us minds, though, as we all have enjoyed the interaction with the neighbors