Roots, shoots and stories

 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

My husband Martin's ancestors all tended to have big families and the family Martin grew up in was no exception - he had seven brothers and two sisters! Whereas in the past these large families lived in crammed accommodation, despite the size of his family, they had more than enough space, though it could be always be described as a 'full house'. The house in question is a stone built Georgian house from around the 1820s. Martin's father, a successful businessman, knew a bargain when he came across one. When he first saw the house in 1960, it was in a terrible state, with holes in the roof and rotten floorboards. The huge garden was waist high in weeds. He bought it for the sum of £1000 and spent the best part of a year repairing and restoring the house and garden to their former states to be a lovely busy home for his large and growing family.   If ten children and two adults were not enough, his Aunt Mary, a lady with special needs, came to live with them after the de

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

 The two great-great grandmothers that I know the least about are my two Irish great-grandmothers, one paternal and one maternal, Sarah Diamond and Jane Chambers. That is not surprising since Irish records can be difficult to research and to find. So what do I know of them and what information am I missing? Sarah first appears when she marries my 2 x great grandfather, William Boag in Glasgow in 1819. Both were working in the textile industry. Source: Scotlands People Their marriage in the Gorbals was conducted by an independent minister, the significance of which was lost on me at the time but became clearer once I started looking for the baptismal records of her children, whom I had found in the 1841 census for Eaglesham, where William was a cotton spinner. Although I could find her sons' baptisms in the Church of Scotland records, it was only when I checked the Catholic records that I found her daughters! That suggested that Sarah was an Irish Catholic and why her marriage to W