Roots, shoots and stories

Over the course of my many years of research, I have come across a few direct ancestors whose life was not only shaped by their religious beliefs but who actually ministered to those beliefs.  My 7 x great grandfather, John Bradfute, was born in 1639. He graduated with an M.A. from the University of Edinburgh in 1658 and, at some point after that, decided he wanted to become a minister in the Church of Scotland.  He was ordained as the minister at Pettinain, a small parish in present day South Lanarkshire in 1689. On the Scotland's Churches Trust website, the church is described as " a fine example of a rural parish church with outstanding views over open countryside". That might not have changed since John delivered his sermons there.  The original church had been established in the 12th century and the present day church dates from the late 17th century.  Pettinain Church   Source:https://canmore.org.uk/site/47649/pettinain-church John died in 1709 and his son James, my

 We live in a world where advances in technology are almost taken for granted. It permeates every aspect of our lives. Even as I sit here typing up this genealogy blog, I can remember that when I started my genealogical journey about forty years ago, there were no laptops, no software, no DNA testing. My journey started with a pen and paper, parish registers and librarians! Even going back a generation to my parents, the amount of technological advance they witnessed during their lifetimes was astounding. Here are a few of the ways in which technology impacted their lives and my memories.  My dad was born in 1914 - according to Wikipedia the first affordable mass produced car was only produced in 1913! His parents never had a car, so my dad was part of the first generation to learn to drive and own many cars in their lifetime. (My mum, like many women in her generation, never learned to drive.) My dad was a civil engineer by profession. Initially for calculations, he used a slide rule,

Martin's maternal grandmother, Mary Ann Pyne married James Murphy in  1914 at the age of 24. At that time she was a laundress and he was a coalminer. They set up home together in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire. Their first child arrived in the October of 1914 and over the next seventeen years, Mary went on to have another eleven children.  Mary Ann Pyne c 1964 Of these twelve children, one, Elizabeth died at the age of four months, and Gerard died aged 51, but all the rest survived into their 70s, 80s, 90s - and Frances even reached her 100th birthday and received her birthday card from the Queen! These were amazing lifespans for these children, given that the older children were raised in cramped accommodation.  Even more amazing is that they were brought up by Mary on her own after her husband James died at the age of 48, leaving her with eight children under the age of 16 and her four older children, one of whom, Mary, had both mental and physical disabilities. Both parents had been de

 Although my husband Martin's dad was Polish, Martin and his siblings were brought up in Scotland in a non-Polish speaking household. Polish was only heard when his father's sisters came to the house or spoke on the phone or when other Polish people his father knew visited. His father's sisters had both married Poles and had brought their children up to be bilingual. Martin's mum was a Scot of Irish descent. What a missed opportunity! Now, late on in life, Martin is attempting to learn Polish, but how much easier would it have been for him to have learned it as a child! His lack of Polish language hasn't helped when we have been working on the Polish side of his family tree. Trying to understand the documents held in various repositories has been a challenge. To that end, he has had to seek help from an amateur genealogist from his grandfather's hometown in Poland.  Whilst doing research on his father's early life in Poland and on his Polish grandfather, Mar