Week 25: Fast #52Ancestorsin52weeks

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 day, you might have gleaned a name or two, a date or two or sometimes nothing. It was a slow process and slow progress was made over those early years.

FAST forward 40 years ....... Things have changed!

Take last week for example. I had come across a fairly new DNA match on Ancestry. Not a particularly close match, but one I could see was most likely related to me through my Anderson line. Their family tree had only 9 people in it and even a couple of those were still living, so no names, and the others had no locations and only a couple of dates. But even with that small amount of information, I was able to go to the Scotlands People website and use their flexible search criteria to start to build that tree back and within a few minutes I had established that the people in at least one of the lines were from places in Lanarkshire that my own ancestors were living. A couple of minutes - that's FAST! Less than an hour later, I had extended their tree back three or four generations on two of the four lines. A piece of research that would have taken me literally years before the advent of the internet and the masses of online resources that are available nowadays. FAST work thanks to modern technology.

But FAST work doesn't always mean good genealogy. It is so easy for those beginning their genealogical journey to get carried away when sites like Ancestry offer 'hints' to a possible ancestor. Some people just take it as gospel and add 'John Smith born in 1875 in Shotts' to their tree, when their actual ancestor is 'John Smith born in 1876 in Shotts' or even 'John Smith born in 1875 in Edinburgh'. Hints need checking out. Sources need to be found - it's so easy to copy someone else's information, especially if it looks as if they have more and better information than you. SLOW and steady genealogy is better in the long run for everyone concerned.

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Week 50: You wouldn't believe it! #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

I have already written about my 3 x great uncle, James McAra, who was sentenced to deportation at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1811. His crime had been to attack his brother, my 3 x great grandfather, Alexander, with an iron bar during an argument, with Alexander being badly hurt and dying a few days later. James was an iron worker by trade in Scotland and continued this trade in the small town of Sorell in Tasmania. We cannot know much about the life he led in Sorell, but he is mentioned in a variety of documents. For example we know he was given a Free Pardon by the Governor of Tasmania and New South Wales in 1836. He also acquired some land in 1839, which, in his Will, he left to daughters of a friend. We know his affection for 'drink', which had led to the fatal fight back in Scotland, never left him as 'excessive drinking' was given as cause of death on his death certificate. However his tombstone bears witness to the fact he was well-liked and a 'good and h

2024 Week 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar, butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes. She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f

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

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