Roots, shoots and stories

 When I first started the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks project two years ago, I resolved to start writing up stories of my ancestors and wider family. I have managed to keep going, writing something for every prompt, including writing about people in my husband Martin's family tree. Some of the stories were there already, just waiting to be put down on paper or, (in my case), in a blog. Others had to be researched and fleshed out. Some topics were a lot harder than others, but I always found something to write about. It has been really worthwhile. I have learned a lot and been able to share these stories with other family members and friends. So what is next? Well, I am going to continue with the weekly prompts for 2025 and hope I don't end up repeating myself. But my resolution for 2025 is to go to my tree on Ancestry, find the individuals I have written about and attach links to the blog entries that are pertinent to them. That way, their stories will reach a wider audience of de...

 My grandmother Christina Walker and her husband John McAra had twelve children together during their 59 years of married life. Her first three children did not survive childhood - her firstborn, John, died aged 8 in 1896, her two next born had preceded him, just infants, in 1890 and 1893. Another daughter, Christina, was to die aged only 6 months in 1900. Such a lot of grief for a couple to go through. Losing children was still all too common around this time, but that doesn't make it any the less traumatic. And yet she was to find the compassion to help a child who was not her own. Christina Walker herself was the second youngest of eleven children. She had married John McAra at the age of 18 in 1887 and her first child was born nine months later. When the baby was just six months old, John was unwell and the young family had to apply for money from the Parish under the Poor Law. Her second child was born early in 1890 and died later on that same year. Meanwhile, her older sister...

 Family consists of more than just people. Most people would agree that pets are 'family' too. Over the decades of having many wonderful cats as pets, I chose all but two of them. Those two chose us. First of all along came a cat, whom we later found it to be called Mittens. He started off as a 'visiting' cat in late 2017. He was not only visiting the garden, but also coming through the cat flap and was not put off by the fact we had three other cats (Toto, Taz and Mia) at this time. As with any 'visitor' we tried not to encourage him, but eventually, when it seemed he was spending most of his time here,  I took him down to our vets to get scanned. It turned out he was registered at our vets so they were able to contact his owner, who came there later to pick him up. We actually met at that time as I was down collecting our cat basket. It turned out that Mittens (named after his big white polydactyl paws) had to cross a main road and come quite a distance to vis...

My father-in-law Jan Stepek, along with his mother and two sisters spent two years in a Soviet labour camp and as refugees during WW2.  Amazingly, despite this, they were able to correspond to family back in Poland. Often these letters were censored or just not delivered, but some still got through. The Red Cross was responsible for delivering letters and parcels, something that still happens in parts of the world to this day which people are unaware of.  After the war, one of the sisters, Danuta, was the first to return to Poland, some 24 years after she had been deported to the camps. There she met her father's two sisters for the first time. After an emotional reunion and conversation one of the aunts left the room and returned with a box. In it was a collection of photographs, documents and some of the letters which had got through to Poland from the labour camps. This was the first time Danuta has seen an image of her parents for over a quarter of a century. Most poignant...

 Every country has its own sayings and proverbs. Poland is no exception. My Polish father-in-law, Jan Stepek, had a few rural Polish sayings, having been brought up on a farm, with the Stepeks having worked the land for centuries. Many of these rural sayings can be quite blunt! His equivalent of the English saying 'to cut off your nose to spite your face" (to do something that harms someone else but also harms yourself) was "Don't pee on your plums!" Plums appear in a lot of Polish sayings. Another one is "W glowie jak po sliwkach" - a head full of plums - applied to someone who is not very bright! I also used one of his Polish sayings in my speech when I was retiring from teaching. There had been and were a lot of changes happening in my school and in Scottish education as a whole at that time and when handing over the reins to a colleague who was taking over my department, I quoted the Polish saying "Nie moj cyrk, nie moje malpy", literally ...