Week 2: Favourite Photo #52Ancestorsin52weeks

Of all the old family photos I have come across over the years, this one of my dad, John McAra, as a young man with his mum, Christina Walker, is one of my favourites. I have no idea at all how old my dad is in the photo, but I’m guessing he would be in his early twenties, so it would have been taken around the mid to late 1930s. That would make his mum in her mid sixties, which seems about right.

The original photo was, of course, in black and white. My dad looks quite dapper in his shirt, jacket and trousers, my grandmother very smart in what might have been her ‘best’ dress as she looks to be wearing her 'best shoes' too. He is holding on to her, which is lovely to see, and both are smiling quite naturally. I like what I see. It looks as though they had a good relationship.

I recently used Ancestry’s colourising tool on the photograph. I’m not sure if my dad’s jacket really was that blue, but it’s very dapper. And my grandmother’s dress, navy with white spots, reminds me of my other gran. One of the only memories I have of her is an old lady wearing a navy dress with white spots – but that is three decades later!

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2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...

2024: Week 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

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2024 Week 19: Preserve #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

A few years ago, I came into the possession of a family bible. It was the family bible of my paternal grandparents, John McAra and Christina Walker. Until her death in 2018, the bible had been in the hands of my Aunt Inez, widow of my Uncle Will McAra. When I started enquiring as to its whereabouts, I found that it was her grandson, John, who now had it. John himself had no real interest in it at all, so he was quite happy to hand it over to me. However, it was, to say the least, in a bit of a state. The front cover was completely detached and there were many loose pages as the spine of the book was also damaged and detached. I had no choice but to take it to a book repairer in Glasgow, where it was repaired as best it could be. The bible itself had been originally published in Glasgow in the late 19th century. In Victorian times it was common for Christian families to have such a large bible in which they could record events such as births, marriages and deaths. The one I have al...

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