Roots, shoots and stories

 Although I have never participated in any grand family reunion, through my genealogical research I have met a couple of people that I would never otherwise have met. Back in 2018 I contacted one of my DNA matches who lived in Australia. I had reason to believe she was connected to me on my maternal side, and comparing our trees I found the connection was my 3 x great grandparents John Anderson and Ann Russell. As I had taken this line back further, I contacted the lady, Robyn, to share the information I had. Robyn, in turn, provided me with a lot of information about her line of descent from this pair and added that she planned to visit Scotland in the coming year. Forward on to 2019 and Robyn and her husband did indeed come over from Australia to Scotland! We met up with them for a walk and  lunch in Glasgow. We had a lovely afternoon, talking about our families and life in general. Their visit to Scotland was only part of their trip as they were visiting Ireland and England too, hav

When in 2001 my father in law Jan Stepek had the first of a series of strokes, my husband Martin realised that if Jan died, he would not know much about his past. Martin already knew some basic facts about his father's early life: Jan had been born and raised on a farm in Eastern Poland, he and his family were deported when WW2 broke out, his mother had died during the deportation period and somehow later on he served in the Polish Navy. The bare bones of a story which Martin has only recently fully told in his book "Jan Stepek  Part 1 : Gulag to Glasgow". So... Martin determined that if his father recovered sufficiently, he would ask him to share the whole story of his early life. Thankfully this was the case. And what a story emerged! As well as interviewing his father, Martin interviewed and filmed his father's two sisters who had also been deported. This meant he had three different perspectives. Over and above this, he researched online and discovered various key

 I have to go back a long way on my family lines to find anyone who was other than working class. My tree is full of miners, labourers and weavers. All people who did not have much money and, in cases where the breadwinner - the male - was unable to work or even died, family circumstances could be dire. Evidence for this scale of poverty can be found on death certificates, census records and Poor Law  Application Records.  I don't have to go back far to find evidence of hardship. In March of 1889, when my grandmother, Christina Walker, was only 20 years old, her husband, a miner, was hospitalised with a fever. At this time the couple had a baby who was only five months old. My grandmother therefore had to put in an application for Poor Relief to the local parish. Poor relief came in the form of a weekly or one off payment or families could be helped with goods like coal or even payment for a doctor. Parochial boards had been introduced in 1845  and each board kept a roll of the poo

Like many other people I have had my DNA tested at 23andme. In my case, it was mainly to access another database of possible DNA matches to help in my genealogical research, but I was interested to see what their health data showed up. I seem to be very fortunate in that I do not seem to have anything in my genes which suggests I have a high increased likelihood of suffering from the many things that are tested for, although I do have a slightly increased likelihood of a few things that seem to 'run in the family'. Many people test specifically with 23andme for the health data as other DNA testing sites do not provide such options, but it is necessary to be aware that even if your results show you have a high likelihood of a disease, there are always more factors at work than just your genes. Having a predisposition to something does not necessarily mean you have it. Our ancestors, of course, did not have such genetic analysis available. They also did not have the medical knowl