Roots, shoots and stories

 Growing up, Christmas always felt an exciting time. My mum would start baking her Christmas cake weeks in advance and nearer the time the Christmas decorations would go up. My mum liked floral art so she would spend some time making up various seasonal arrangements, even using a paste of washing powder to create snowy scenes. The decorative paper chains would be hung around the room - thankfully that is not a tradition anymore! But some 'habits' are passed on and they become tradition just over a couple of generations. One of those habits comes down from my dad. It was my dad who decorated the Christmas tree. He would spend what seemed like hours checking the fairy light bulbs. In those old sets if one bulb went, then the whole set wouldn't light up, so each bulb had to be checked one by one - and what if there were more than one dud bulb?? After the light check was completed, then they had to go on the tree. This process took what seemed like forever too - and I wasn'...

 My husband's aunt, Mary Murphy, was born in 1917 in Rutherglen, Scotland, the third of twelve children, born to James Murphy, a coalminer and his wife Mary Ann. Her parents had just had a terrible year as their second child, Elizabeth had died at only three months old of a bowel disease. The expectation of a new baby must have filled them with a combination of dread and hope.  We don't know when the couple discovered that Mary also had problems, but her problems were from birth and lifelong and she was termed in those days 'a slow learner' which, nowadays we know would cover a variety of developmental problems, both mental and physical. She went to a special school for children with learning problems but was taken out as she was being bullied. Mary was unable to work and she was looked after by her mother until Mary Ann herself died in 1968. Mary herself had suffered a stroke in the 1960s while on a visit with her mother to visit her sister, Frances in America.  After ...

The majority of my direct ancestors and their family members have lived and worked in Central Scotland for the last couple of hundred years. Therefore many have been involved in metal working, coal mining and weaving. My paternal grandfather was a miner and two of his sons followed him down the mine, one sadly dying in a roof collapse. Two of my great grandfathers were miners as well, the others metal workers. Lanarkshire was literally the 'Black Country' of Scotland, with the whole of what is termed the Central Coalfield located there. In the late 19th century more than half of Scotland's coal was mined there. Angus Watson, a cousin of my father's, was born in Cleland, Lanarkshire in 1884 into a family typical for that area. His father, John, was a coal face worker and all John's sons were to follow him down the pit. In 1891, when Angus was still only 8 years old, three of his brothers were already working in the coal mines - William, aged 16 was working at the coa...

 My paternal cousin Chrissie, still going strong at 95, is always interested in my 'family stories' and how I go about our family genealogy. To that end, she was good enough to take a DNA test a few years back as she knew that could help my research. Little did she realise that that DNA test would be the key to breaking down a mystery on her maternal side years later. Chrissie's mother was Agnes Crawford, born in 1904 to Agnes Crawford /Cunningham, who herself had been born in 1882. Both Chrissie's mother and her grandmother, the two Agnes Crawfords, were born to unmarried mothers.  Previous research of mine had unearthed successful court paternity claims against a James Bell as being her mother's father, but there was initially nothing to indicate who could have been the father of the first Agnes Crawford, her grandmother, as the father's name had been left blank on her birth certificate. However, a name was 'suggested' by an entry on her marriage certi...

 Two of my husband Martin's aunts, one on each side of his family, had to make decisions which would transform their lives in one way or another. Orphaned in WW2 after losing her mother to starvation on the way from a labour camp in the Soviet Union to freedom in Persia, fifteen year old Maria Danuta (Danka) Stepek was transferred to Palestine. At the and of the war she was happy to stay in Palestine, but when the Arab-Israeli War broke out in 1948, all Polish citizens were evacuated to England. There she became friendly with an older couple, both lawyers,  who had no children of their own. They suggested to her that they would adopt her formally and she could emigrate with them to the USA. Danka deeply appreciated the offer as she was very close to the couple, but made the decision to stay in Britain, where her brother and her sister now also lived.  Danka (on the left) in 1947 alongside Martin's mum, Teresa Murphy. A decade later, another of Martin's aunts, this time on...

Apart from four of my cousins who have kindly had their DNA tested for me, the closest matches I usually get popping up on the various testing sites are second cousins and their children. Imagine my surprise when a few months ago a closer match turned up - let's call him "Austin" (international man of mystery :)  ). Austin shared 264cM with me, approx. 4% of my DNA. Our common ancestor(s) aren't too far away! And given I am confident in my family tree, with confirmed DNA descendants much further out than our shared ancestors would be, I set about trying to find out who Austin was. I could see right away that Austin was related to me on my maternal side, as he shared DNA with the two maternal cousins of mine who have tested. To narrow the specific line I had to look and see what other matches we shared and it was obvious that Austin was descended from somebody on my maternal Anderson line. Austin had a family tree and luckily only one of his grandparents' lines wer...

So .... in the future one of your descendants wants to delve into their family history. Let's imagine they are really good at tracing records such as birth, marriage, deaths and censuses. They find you - but what do they really know about you, apart from those crucial dates, places and your job? (Of course, we don't know how far your imprint on today's social media will transfer through the generations, so they might very well find out what you had for lunch and where yesterday, but we don't know that for certain.) There may well be some older relative who remembers you and you may get lucky if they knew you well enough to tell them what kind of a person you were and some stories about you. But most people will likely remain unknown, existing as a name and relevant dates. That's quite sad really, as everyone has their story to tell. A story that I have been luckily enough to piece together, and, which I have written about before, is that of my 3 x great granduncle, ...