Roots, shoots and stories

Anyone who ever attended a McAra family wedding would easily have been able to tell which guests were on the McAra side by looking at what they were drinking - lemonade and orange juice mainly! For some unknown reason, the McAras were teetotal. It did not seem to be anything to do with religion, nor were they a part of some temperance movement. My dad would have alcohol in the house -  as a civil engineer, he used to be given bottles of whisky by various contractors, and he was happy to offer a whisky to a visitor to our home - but he never touched it himself. Although the reason for this 'family trait' was never spoken about, I always felt there had to be something. It was when I was researching my 3 x great grandfather, Alexander McAra, that I came across a story that may possibly have started this family trait. Alexander McAra was the ancestor who was killed by his brother in 1810 in the iron mill at Cramond, near Edinburgh. The altercation which led to his death seems to ha

My grandfather, John McAra, was a coalminer. The generations of McAras before him had worked with iron, originally in Cramond, Midlothian, then subsequently in Lanarkshire. We find him in the 1881 census at age 17 already a coalminer and five years later, when he married my grandmother, Christina Walker, his address was given as 'Spoutscroft'. Later on, documents show the family moved to nearby Greenhill and subsequently Whitehill and by 1921, at the age of 57, when the census first records a place of work, he was employed by the Murdostoun Coal Company. I was interested in finding out where he might have worked in those earlier years, so I decided to 'dig a little deeper' and do some research on mining in that area of Lanarkshire. I believe I found what I was looking for. The Greenhill Colliery Company Ltd is one of the many mining concerns listed on their site - and, they housed their workforce at both Spoutscroft and Greenhill!                                       

Almost 40 years ago, it was my friend Allison, who had already started researching her family tree, who sparked off my interest - some might say "obsession" - in genealogy. She shared her findings from the occasional trip through to Edinburgh's New Register House, where Scottish records were held and, if my memory serves me well, we went through together a couple of times. When our children were born, the time we could allocate to researching waned, but our interest still remained and we are both still excited by our research even today. Although Allison is the only one of my friends to share this passion, I have 'forced' other friends to become interested. I persuaded my friend Margaret and her mother to take  DNA tests to see if I could help her discover who her adopted father's birth parents were and trace her paternal roots. It did take me about a year, but through good old fashioned genealogy and tracing the trees of her genetic matches, we discovered her

Nowadays, the word 'travel'  conjures up pictures of holidays, of good times spent with those we care about. In past times, for our ancestors, travel would have meant something very different - a search for work in a different part of the country or a start of a new life in a far away place. For others, however, travel was something they undertook to save their very lives. It is the 11th September 1941. This morning, Janina Stepek (38) and her three children, Jan (19), Zofia (16) and Maria Danuta (14) make a momentous decision. Some weeks previously the family and the other prisoners in the Charytonowo Labour Camp in northern Russia had been informed that they were now free to leave, due to the German invasion of Russia. So today, the youngest child is now well enough to undertake the journey. They have to head south - north leads to the Arctic, west leads to the frontline and east is the vast wastelands of Siberia. They have also been told that Polish officials have been permi

 As far as I am aware my longest living recent ancestor was my paternal grandmother, Christina Barr Walker (1868-1961). She lived to be 92. I must have met her, but I have no memories of her, as I was only three years old when she died and I was living in Newcastle upon Tyne at that time. She died from pneumonia after falling and breaking a leg. Recently I learned that in her final years, she had been suffering from dementia. She had survived her husband, John McAra, by fifteen years and during her lifetime she had lost four children and two adult sons.  My grandmother, Christina Barr Walker, as a young woman. The ninth out of ten children, Christina was brought up on a farm, her dad starting off in life as an agricultural labourer, then becoming a blacksmith. She was given the middle name 'Barr' (a 'family' name that I was given) but which my research has shown me was never a family name!  Christina Barr seems to have been the name of the milkmaid who lived next door t