2025 Week 6: Surprise! #52Ancestorsin 52 Weeks

You never know what you will find when you are researching. Fortunately my 'surprises' have been good ones.

My friend Allison, like me, has been researching her family history since the 1980s. We even knew each other back then! However, it was only recently that we both got a big surprise - and found that we are related. Allison is my fourth cousin once removed, with our common ancestors being James Sommerville and Mary Telfer, my fourth great grandparents and Allison's third great grandparents. It was fun to find that out, especially since our children grew up together as well and now find out that they are 'cousins'. We do not seem to share any DNA however.

DNA research threw up another surprise a few years ago. I had been researching my friend Margaret's unknown set of grandparents (her father had been adopted at birth). During the course of that research, I found that we had a shared DNA match in common! We are not related to each other in any way, but there is a connection by marriage.

I also got a surprise when I contacted one of my DNA matches, a young man named Mark, with whom I shared 71cM. I could see from our shared matches that he was a match to me through my paternal grandmother, Christina Walker. A little bit more digging and I realised he was my 2nd cousin twice removed. I messaged him to give him the information he was lacking on his tree, only to get this message back :

Given that my ancestors stuck around west central Scotland I am sure that there are many more more surprises to be found out there. I wonder how many other 'cousins' I have taught or passed by in the street??

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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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