Week 52: Me, myself and I #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking back from a future I will never know, what will my descendants know about ME?

I will have left quite a substantial family tree for immediate future generations, if they are able to access it, so they will know that at the very least I was the family historian/storyteller. My children know quite a bit about my early life and we are close, so I feel they know me well. If they have children, will they pass on what they know? Will their children even be interested? And as for generations after that, the immediate knowledge will diminish and may even be lost sooner than I think. I can't start to imagine the amount of information I could have had even about my own parents had I thought to ask them while I still could, never mind my grandparents or great grandparents. Lives all gone, lifetimes forgotten.

And what have I discovered about MYSELF in doing this #52ancestors challenge?

I have learned that I like the discipline of 'having to' produce a piece of writing on a given topic. Taking part has let me share stories I had already discovered and also do deeper research on others to learn their tales - and I enjoy that very much. I also have learned that although it is great to write and share stories with others, it is also fun just doing it for MYSELF.

So, how will #52ancestors affect what I do next?

Firstly, I intend to try and keep up the challenge in 2024. It could be that I will run out of stories to tell or it could be that I have to look further into the branches on my tree to find new ones. I know that even if I don't manage another 52 I will keep writing on my blog, the first blog I have ever written!

I'd like to thank Amy Johnson Crow for organising #52ancestorsin52weeks and of course I'd like to thank each and everyone of you out there, who have come across any (or all 52!) of my blog entries. Maybe I have inspired some of you to to research your own family. You don't have to build a tree or blog. Just ask questions and discover the stories!

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 19: Preserve #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

A few years ago, I came into the possession of a family bible. It was the family bible of my paternal grandparents, John McAra and Christina Walker. Until her death in 2018, the bible had been in the hands of my Aunt Inez, widow of my Uncle Will McAra. When I started enquiring as to its whereabouts, I found that it was her grandson, John, who now had it. John himself had no real interest in it at all, so he was quite happy to hand it over to me. However, it was, to say the least, in a bit of a state. The front cover was completely detached and there were many loose pages as the spine of the book was also damaged and detached. I had no choice but to take it to a book repairer in Glasgow, where it was repaired as best it could be. The bible itself had been originally published in Glasgow in the late 19th century. In Victorian times it was common for Christian families to have such a large bible in which they could record events such as births, marriages and deaths. The one I have al...

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