Roots, shoots and stories

One man's 'troublemaker' can be another man's hero. One of my 20th great-grandfathers was such a man.  And a famous one at that! Robert the Bruce, King Robert I of Scotland for the last two decades of his life, was certainly a troublemaker in the eyes of the English. An ardent proponent for Scottish Independence, he is best known for defeating the English Army at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. After Bannockburn, he was not content to just defend Scotland, but actively led incursions into the north of England. Nowadays he is still revered as one of Scotland's heroes. Image from www.factinate.com But this wasn't always the case. Many Scots had cause to see him as a troublemaker too - or  at times, even worse, a traitor.  When, in 1296,  the then King John Balliol required all able bodied Scots to fight against the English, Robert was one of several Scottish nobles to ignore the summons. Notably then the first city attacked by Balliol's troops was Carlisle,

My direct ancestry is not at all exotic. Although my percentage ethnicities do vary a bit from one testing company to another, one thing is clear: I am very, very Scottish. 23andme have me as 99.5% Scottish/Irish, Ancestry at 71% Scottish, 27% Irish. The Irish I know comes to me through one 2 x great grandmother on my maternal side and one 3 x great grandmother on my paternal side. I do have one 3 x great grandfather who was English, but everywhere else you look on my tree it is Scotland all the way, and Central Scotland at that too.  All my direct ancestors for the last two hundred years are all Lanarkshire born! It appears that my ancestors were quite happy to stay in Scotland, only moving relatively locally to improve their chances of work. The coalfields of Lanarkshire proved an attractive prospect for people who had been iron workers and general labourers. The cotton mills also provided work for many of them. These people benefited from the start of the Industrial Revolution and n

Although I do have a couple of direct ancestors who were farmers, they lived back in the late 18th - early 19th century and I haven't yet found information on their farms. So this week I'm going to come closer to home and write a little bit about my Uncle Will, William McAra (1901-1983).  As a child, after being at church with my mum on a Sunday, my dad would pick us both up and we would drive a few miles up the road to visit my Uncle Will and Aunt Inez. They lived on a small holding and raised chickens. These small holdings dated from just after WW2 when the government were trying to encourage food production post war. Pre-war, Uncle Will, like his father and elder brothers before him, had worked in the local mines. I  remember getting really excited one day, being taken into a big building where there were hundreds of fluffy yellow chicks. This building would have been the brooder house. The chicks were bought in when they were a day old and kept in the brooder house until th

My husband's paternal line is Polish and his grandfather, Wladyslaw Stepek, fought in two World Wars.  When WW1 started, Poland was under the occupation of three different empires: German, Russian and Austrian. Wladyslaw's family lived in the Austrian occupied area. In the summer of 1914, twenty-one years old, he had studied chemistry, so when conscripted into the army, he was placed in the medical corps. The following April he was captured by the Russian Army and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Ukraine. He spent two years there before being released - the full story of that is given in my week 11 post "Lucky"  https://rootsshootsandstories.blogspot.com/2023/03/week-11-lucky-52ancestorsin52weeks.html   Wladyslaw's POW camp release form On his return home he was hospitalised and, when he recovered, he agitated against Austrian rule for the return of Polish independence. This resulted in him being imprisoned again, but for a shorter time. When he was released the