Week 42: Friends #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

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 grandparents and their story, tracing her dad's mother's side back to 18th century Donegal and her dad's father's side up to the Highlands of Scotland. My proudest moments were showing her her father's original birth certificate and the graves of her paternal 3 x great grandfather, James Stevens, and her 4 x great grandfather Gavin Rowatt, in Hamilton where she, too, now lives.

Gravestones in Bent Cemetery, Hamilton.

I have helped quite a number of other friends too. I enjoy the research and learning about other people's families. Every one is unique. And every time I take on a new 'project' I feel I am improving my own skills. So it is win - win. So thank you, friends!

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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 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 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

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...

Roots, shoots and stories

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