2024 Week 48: Very funny #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

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 'not my circus, not my monkeys' using it basically to say 'It's not my problem anymore'. I could get away this flippant remark as the lady in question was one of my best friends and she loved it! :)

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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 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...

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...

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