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 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar, butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes. She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f...

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...

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