Roots, shoots and stories

 The Clydesdale horse is a Scottish breed of horse, originally bred in the Clyde Valley of Lanarkshire, Scotland, from where it gets its name. A very large horse, weighing between 700-1000kg, it has its origins in the 18th century, when a John Paterson of Lochlyloch in Lanarkshire imported a Flemish stallion from England and bred it with a mare belonging to the Sixth Duke of Hamilton. That John Paterson was my 7 x great grandfather. John Lumsden ploughing with two Clydesdales in Balkemback, Tealing, Angus, 1931. Part of the  Scottish Life Archive . Source:nms.ac.uk The first foal was born in 1720 and that is when the breed was given its name. Clydesdales are magnificent horses. They were used in agriculture, logging, mining, road haulage, in short, whenever a powerful slow horse was required. Many horses were exported as far away as Australia and New Zealand. With the advent of machinery which could do the work faster, the number of these slow horses began to decline. Many lost their l

 I started researching my own family tree in the 1980s. As far as I knew, no-one had ever put anything like it down on paper for either my dad's side (McAra) or my mum's side (Anderson). The resources that were readily available were few and only accessible with a lot of planning and some luck. Being initially armed with names of my grandparents but not much else, I had to set off for a whole day out at New Register House in Edinburgh where Scotland's records were housed. It was NOT fast! Getting up early to drive to the station to catch a train, paying the fee required for a daily search, sitting at a desk filling in forms with the person's name, possible dates/locations, handing that over to an archivist/librarian, then waiting patiently until she returned with a microfilm that you then had to scroll through manually on a reader, hoping you didn't miss anything .... It was a long process, certainly not a fast one and one which, if you were lucky, by the end of the

 Maria Danuta Stepek (known as Danka) was born in 1927 in Maczkowce, Poland. She was the youngest of three children of Wladyslaw and Janina Stepek, my husband's grandparents. She had a happy childhood on her parents' farm until the outbreak of war in September 1939. When the Soviet Union invaded from the east, her father Wladyslaw was quickly informed that he was on a list of those persons to be arrested and executed. He fled into hiding with the Resistance and this was the last time she saw him. Four months later, 12 year old Danka, her sister Zofia (14), her brother Jan (17) and her mother were deported to northern Russia near the Arctic Circle. The journey took three weeks by cattle train and ended at a political labour camp where they lived and worked for the next eighteen months. All her family members, including Danka herself, fell ill in the camp and all were malnourished. Her mother lost 4 stones in weight. On their release in October 1941, they had to make their own wa

 Much of the time I spend on genealogy involves me working on my DNA matches to find out how we are related.  It is something I take a great deal of pleasure in and find really rewarding. Among the many thousands of matches I have, I have been able to identify hundreds of them - assigning them initially as a paternal or maternal line match, then to a specific line: ... and hopefully then on to the common ancestor or ancestral couple. But there is one group which eludes me - for the moment! - since, as yet, I have been unable to find how my tree links into the common ancestors they all share. This is the group whose common ancestral couple have left so many descendants and there is a very good reason for that. So far, as you can see, I have identified 77 of my matches on Ancestry as belonging to this group, but there are many, many more. I managed to work out that these people match me on the maternal side of my family. Have I managed to find out which line yet? No. Have I managed to fi