A chance encounter at a war memorial has prompted an American professor to find her Maryport roots.

Town council chairman Peter Kendall was cleaning the Maryport Memorial when he struck up conversation with a couple from the North East.

Mr and Mrs O'Brien had come to honour Mr O'Brien's grandfather, Edmund Vaughan DCM, who served in the Boer War and WWI and had been a respected Police Inspector for the Maryport Railway.

Mr Kendall said he enjoyed the conversation: "But I was surprised, a few days later, to get an email from a Dr Louise O'Brien, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan.

She said as far as the family understood, Edmund Vaughan was highly regarded in the local community "but we don't know any other Vaughan's and are relying on family hearsay and what I can find in local newspapers of the time on information available on ancestry.co.uk.

She said: "Firstly I would like to thank you for maintaining the war memorial.

"Secondly, after my parents had left, they realized that the name Kendall was familiar.... and came back to talk to you but you had gone. After Edmund Vaughan died in 1920, his wife (Annie Dover Vaughan, nee Lewis) remarried - and she married a William H Kendall in 1922.

"We know very little about him other than he went to Lancashire. Some other members of the family didn't even realise she had remarried but I do have some documents showing it to be true."

Dr O'Brien is now calling on the people of Maryport to fill in some of the blanks:

" I believe that my dad told you that I was very interested in genealogy - and I wondered if there was any relation there? I have done a bit more digging in the past week (from online records as I currently live in the USA) and if I have the correct person, William H Kendall seems to come from London so not sure how he came to be in Maryport. Or why he went to Lancashire. Apparently he was a paraffin salesman so maybe something to do with that."

Anyone with information about the Vaughans or the Kendalls can get in touch with Dr O'Brien at louiseo@med.umich.edu