Week 30: In the News #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

I came across an old newspaper clipping at some point in my family research. It was from a local paper, The Wishaw Press and Advertiser. The title - "Here's a family with a unique record", a photograph and an explanation underneath.

The photo shows four generations, with the youngest of the four being 'over 21'. (There had obviously been time for a fifth to come along!) In the photograph is my paternal grandmother, Christina McAra, aged 89 - a grandmother I never knew - her daughter Mary, my aunt, my cousin Christina and her grown up son Hugh.

The article states another fact - when Hugh was born in 1936, all of his four great grandmothers and three of his great grandfathers were still alive! That must be some record. I can't help but be envious that Hugh could have asked so many questions of all of those people, as I never got the chance to talk to any of my own grandparents.

Hugh is now 87 and a great grandfather himself.

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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...

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Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however, the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...

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