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.

Comments

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

Search This Blog