Roots, shoots and stories

In genealogical terms 'cousins' do not just refer to your 'first cousins', those people who share a set of grandparents with you. It can be used to refer to your second, third, fourth etc cousins who share a common set of ancestors with you, be they great grandparents or 15 x great grandparents. One of my paternal lines can be traced back to Robert the Bruce, King Robert I of Scotland and one of my maternal lines includes King James II of Scotland, so you can imagine there are a lot of important cousins to be found. So let me introduce you to a very distant cousin. In genealogical terms he is my second cousin seventeen (!) times removed. Meet Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan aka The Wolf (or Beast) of Badenoch! Our common ancestor is the famous Robert The Bruce, my 20 x great grandfather. Robert was Alexander's great grandfather. My line descends through King Robert's daughter Elizabeth, Alexander's line through her sister Marjorie. Marjorie married Sir Wal...

 In Central Scotland, the name 'Stepek' is well-known, despite the fact the the first Stepek who came to Scotland was my father-in-law, Jan Stepek. Jan arrived as a young man in Scotland in 1946, demobbed from the Polish Navy. (I have written about Jan's experiences during WW2 in other blog posts, detailing his deportation as a teenager with his mother and sisters to a labour camp in Siberia, his traumatic journey from Siberia to freedom and his joining the Polish Navy, but it is when Jan finally arrived in Scotland, the next phase of his life began.) He had been given a grant to study television and radio engineering in Glasgow and while there in 1947 he met Teresa Murphy at a dance. Teresa had left school at the age of 14 but had studied bookkeeping at night school and worked as a bookkeeper for a small business in Glasgow. They married in February 1949 and quickly discussed the possibility of going into business for themselves. Jan knew how to repair radios (and televisi...