Week 46: " This ancestor went to market.." #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

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 they grew. Next they would be taken to live in huts in the field and after that, according to my cousin Rena, they would go to the battery house. (I'm glad I didn't see that!) In those days, of course, "battery hens" would have been viewed as a big 'advance' in hen keeping - by the farmers at least, not by the poor hens. And of course, they were my uncle's livelihood. Butchers would come out from Glasgow to kill the hens, using different methods depending on their religion. Cleaning out the smelly battery cages was hard manual work for my uncle too, but also provided him with fertilizer to sell to local farmers.

As a child, of course, I was oblivious to all that hen keeping entailed. (My cousins Rena and her brother John not so much.) The fluffy chicks are my memory - and my Uncle Will of course, who was always dressed in his dark blue farming dungarees.

Special thanks to my cousin Rena who was kind enough to give me information for this blog entry.

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