Maria Kerr was born in Pontypridd in 1944, starting work aged sixteen, at a local cottage hospital. Aged seventeen she joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corp, QARANC, enabling her to travel and train as a nurse, both in the UK and the Far East. She met her husband in 1965 and married the following year in Treforest, where their first child was born in 1967. The family moved briefly to Scotland where two further children were born, and returned for good to South Wales in 1972. A fourth child was born in 1982, and Maria returned to nursing when the children were older, retiring in 2019 aged 75. She then began researching her family history, publishing her first book about her family’s history, Flesh on Their Bones, in 2022, and a second, Ladder of My Life, in 2024, both available in Pontypridd Library.