My name is Rhys Maren.
I was born in Tal-y-Cafn, North Wales, in 1963. My grandmother, Margaret, raised me for most of my childhood. I grew up between the coast and the hills, in a place where people remembered stories long after they had forgotten where they first heard them. The house was full of old photographs, family history and conversations that drifted easily between memory and fact. At the time, I did not realise how difficult it could be to tell the difference.
My life was expected to follow a fairly ordinary course. It did not.
After leaving school I worked in a succession of ordinary jobs. Eventually I found myself investigating questions that other people had been unable to resolve. Most were not especially complicated. They simply required someone willing to spend longer looking at the evidence than everyone else had.
The evidence varied. A document whose history had been forgotten. A photograph without a name. A recording that did not quite fit the accepted account. Later came computer records and digital files. Different forms of evidence required different methods, but the question remained the same: what could actually be proved?
My work changed with them.
I spent much of my career reconstructing events from whatever evidence remained. Sometimes the records were complete. More often they were not. A witness remembered one thing and forgot another. A document survived but its context had disappeared. A photograph recorded a moment without explaining it. A computer preserved a decision without preserving the reason behind it.
The work was never about proving a theory. It was about establishing what the available evidence actually supported and understanding the people whose lives had left that evidence behind.
Through all of it, I kept returning to North Wales. The landscape changed more slowly than the rest of the world. The sea was rarely the same twice, but it never pretended to be anything else.
I still live in the house where my grandmother raised me. I left for many years. Eventually I came back.
These days, my investigations usually begin with something left behind. A photograph. A recording. A document. An archive. A digital file. Something that survives after the person who created it can no longer explain what it means.
Evidence can be followed because evidence can establish what happened. But that is rarely where the investigation ends. Records belong to people and understanding the life behind a record often matters more than simply proving that the record is genuine.
Most people expect investigations to end with certainty. Mine usually end with something more modest: a clearer understanding of what happened, who was there, what can genuinely be proved and what must remain uncertain.
I have learned to be satisfied with that.
The evidence may begin the investigation. The person behind it is the reason I continue.
