Roots, shoots and stories

 My Aunt Meg was born Margaret Keir Anderson in May 1909, the daughter of Margaret Keir Adams and John Anderson, as yet unmarried. Young Meg was therefore brought up by her maternal grandparents, Margaret and James Adams. We find her there in the 1911 census with her mum, Margaret, her grandparents and three of her mother's younger siblings. In that census, her mother has no occupation listed, so presumably she was looking after Meg and not just expecting her own mother to do that for her. Despite being an unmarried mother, Margaret must have continued to see John Anderson as, four years later, in 1915, Margaret gave birth to a sister for Meg, my own mum Helen Young Anderson. They had actually got married a few months before this event. It was what was termed an 'irregular' marriage, a marriage of declaration in front of two witnesses, a type of marriage legal in Scotland until 1940. So around this time, young Meg and her mother would have moved out of the Adams family home...

My great grandmother, Helen Young (1843-1917). My mother was born on the 27th of June 1915, second daughter to John Anderson and Margaret Adams. Following Scottish naming traditions, her elder sister had been named Margaret after her mother's mother and she was named after her father's mother, Helen Young. My mother's full name was therefore Helen Young Anderson. My mum was not the only one of Helen's descendants to carry on her name. Helen Young's name was preserved down the generations - Helen Young Robertson, Helen (Nellie)Young Danks, Helen (Nellie) Young Hastie, Helen Young .... were all my mother's cousins and Helen's grandchildren. She also had great grandchildren who had 'Helen Young' as part of their  names and at least one great great grandchild whose middle name is Helen. Multiple descendants carrying her name.  I do not know how much my mum knew about the grandmother she had been named after as Helen Young died when my mum was only two ye...

The majority of my direct ancestors and their family members have lived and worked in Central Scotland for the last couple of hundred years. Therefore many have been involved in metal working, coal mining and weaving. My paternal grandfather was a miner and two of his sons followed him down the mine, one sadly dying in a roof collapse. Two of my great grandfathers were miners as well, the others metal workers. Lanarkshire was literally the 'Black Country' of Scotland, with the whole of what is termed the Central Coalfield located there. In the late 19th century more than half of Scotland's coal was mined there. Angus Watson, a cousin of my father's, was born in Cleland, Lanarkshire in 1884 into a family typical for that area. His father, John, was a coal face worker and all John's sons were to follow him down the pit. In 1891, when Angus was still only 8 years old, three of his brothers were already working in the coal mines - William, aged 16 was working at the coa...

 Two of my husband Martin's aunts, one on each side of his family, had to make decisions which would transform their lives in one way or another. Orphaned in WW2 after losing her mother to starvation on the way from a labour camp in the Soviet Union to freedom in Persia, fifteen year old Maria Danuta (Danka) Stepek was transferred to Palestine. At the and of the war she was happy to stay in Palestine, but when the Arab-Israeli War broke out in 1948, all Polish citizens were evacuated to England. There she became friendly with an older couple, both lawyers,  who had no children of their own. They suggested to her that they would adopt her formally and she could emigrate with them to the USA. Danka deeply appreciated the offer as she was very close to the couple, but made the decision to stay in Britain, where her brother and her sister now also lived.  Danka (on the left) in 1947 alongside Martin's mum, Teresa Murphy. A decade later, another of Martin's aunts, this time on...

Apart from four of my cousins who have kindly had their DNA tested for me, the closest matches I usually get popping up on the various testing sites are second cousins and their children. Imagine my surprise when a few months ago a closer match turned up - let's call him "Austin" (international man of mystery :)  ). Austin shared 264cM with me, approx. 4% of my DNA. Our common ancestor(s) aren't too far away! And given I am confident in my family tree, with confirmed DNA descendants much further out than our shared ancestors would be, I set about trying to find out who Austin was. I could see right away that Austin was related to me on my maternal side, as he shared DNA with the two maternal cousins of mine who have tested. To narrow the specific line I had to look and see what other matches we shared and it was obvious that Austin was descended from somebody on my maternal Anderson line. Austin had a family tree and luckily only one of his grandparents' lines wer...

So .... in the future one of your descendants wants to delve into their family history. Let's imagine they are really good at tracing records such as birth, marriage, deaths and censuses. They find you - but what do they really know about you, apart from those crucial dates, places and your job? (Of course, we don't know how far your imprint on today's social media will transfer through the generations, so they might very well find out what you had for lunch and where yesterday, but we don't know that for certain.) There may well be some older relative who remembers you and you may get lucky if they knew you well enough to tell them what kind of a person you were and some stories about you. But most people will likely remain unknown, existing as a name and relevant dates. That's quite sad really, as everyone has their story to tell. A story that I have been luckily enough to piece together, and, which I have written about before, is that of my 3 x great granduncle, ...

My husband's paternal grandmother, Janina Ciupka, was born in 1902 in a small town, Nieszawa, north of Warsaw, Poland, on the banks of the River Vistula. She was the youngest of 12 children, only 8 of whom survived to adulthood. At this time Poland had been occupied by their three neighbours, Germany, Russia and Austria and Warsaw was under Russian control.  Her family were very wealthy, owning granaries, bakeries, brick factories and carriage factories and they also bred white horses for the Russian Tzars. As with her elder siblings, Janina was taught by a private governess and the family had many servants, including cooks and cleaners. She obviously was leading a very privileged life. There was little known about the  period of her life from about 1909-1919, The family had moved south eastwards to Haczow around 1909. The reasons for the move seems to have been a combination of business and politics, as Haczow was under Austrian rule, considered more liberal than that of the ...

 My mum, Helen Young Anderson was born on the 27th of June 1915, the second eldest daughter of John Anderson and Margaret Keir Adams. Her father John had originally worked as a tinsmith and was a steelworker at the time of my mum's birth, an occupation that had exempted him from serving in WW1. John and Margaret had only married four months before my mum was born and their ceremony, conducted at Hope Street Registry Office in Glasgow was an 'irregular marriage', one not conducted by a church minister (and therefore not approved by the Church) but one the Church accepted as alternative to a couple 'living in sin'. The reason for this probably being that Margaret was already pregnant with my mum and had already had another child by John, my aunt Meg, who by this time was six years old, being brought up by Margaret's parents, my great grandparents, James Adams and Margaret Keir. John and Margaret went on to have three more children over the next eight years - Anne,...

When I'm looking at census records I find it useful to look at other records on the page other than those of the family I'm searching for. One day in September I was checking out census records for my 4 x great grandfather James Somerville. I know he was a medical doctor and that he studied at the University of Edinburgh and that he came to live in Cambusnethan Parish in Lanarkshire. I have his marriage, his children, but no death locally. Nor can I find that of his wife, Janet Telfer. It made sense therefore to check further afield, so I was looking over 1841 census details of three James Somervilles in other parts of Scotland, when something - or should I say - someone else caught my eye in the census for Drumelzie in Peeblesshire. Further up the page, lodging with a farmer was a man named Charles Mackay, aged 50 who was a ... comedian by trade! Really??? A comedian in 1841? I'd never come across such a thing before. Maybe the person giving the census responses was being ...

A lot of the time, when I start investigating some direct ancestor, I find myself following their siblings and their descendants and finding some pretty interesting people! I am lucky that on my direct paternal line, I can trace my ancestors back to Edinburgh, and to the Canongate, to be specific. Lucky in that records from the 17th century there have been preserved and this is where this story starts, with my 7 x great grandfather, Patrick Mcarra, who was a Baillie in the Canongate. I have written about him and his position previously  here. I descend from Patrick and his second wife, Helen Wilkie. His first wife had died leaving him with two daughters, Mary and Margaret. Mary did well for herself. In 1698, she married the Reverend John Andersone, minister at West Calder. Now, normally I might have left Mary and John alone at this point, but I was intrigued by the pairing, simply because my dad  (McAra) had married my mum, an Anderson! So I kept investigating! They had a daug...

 A recurring name in my paternal line is that of John McAra. That was my dad's name. It was also the name of his father, his grandfather, his great grandfather - and then there's a break - then his 2 x great grandfather - a break - and his 4 x great grandfather! The reason for the two 'breaks' is down to the Scottish naming tradition of naming the firstborn son after the father's father. The two breaks in the line are where my direct ancestor was not the firstborn son and therefore given a name other than John. (If he had been second born, he would have been given that of the mother's father.) But .... my dad was the youngest child born in a family of  12 children! When I first started my family research, I found out that he was actually the second 'John'. The first John had indeed been the first son, born some 26 years before my dad! Sadly he had passed away at the age of 8 from what appears to have been a cerebral haemorrhage. My grandparents decided t...

My family have been living in Lanarkshire for the past 200 years. Both my grandfathers were coalminers and mining and metal working go way back in both sides of my family. I have already written about the role of mining in my family - see  https://rootsshootsandstories.blogspot.com/2023/10/week-43-dig-little-deeper.html  - and it is well documented that the miner's life was a very hard one. Recently I have come across other documents relevant to a miner's life. The one below details a typical wage for a miner in Lanarkshire around the time of my grandfathers and it is interesting to note how it went up and down. The average being around 4-5 shillings a day - according to the National Archives currency converter that would anunt to roughly £15 a day and this would be for a 12 hour day, six days a week. And as a job it wasn't without danger. Here is only part of a list for deaths in Lanarkshire coalmines in January of 1887!! Source:  http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/Indexes/...

This story stems from research into what happened to my Irish 2 x great grandmother, Sarah Diamond, when I dug deeper into the lives of the children she had had with her husband, William Boag, and also into the children he had with another woman, Margaret Muir. Sarah vanishes from the records after 1841 and is recorded as deceased by the time her second eldest son, William, dies in 1855. So I started looking into the life of her eldest son, Thomas, born in 1824 in Eaglesham, where both his parents had been workers in the cotton mill. Thomas had been baptised into the Roman Catholic faith, his mother, Sarah, being herself a Catholic. In the 1841 census, Thomas is also following the family into to the cotton mill as a cotton spinner. Four years later, he marries a woman called Elizabeth Colquhoun in a Church of Scotland ceremony and the couple settle in Glasgow, in the East end of the city. They did have several children, who unfortunately all seem to have died young, as by 1861 the cens...

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...

 As well as researching my own family, one of the other trees I have spent a lot of time on is that of my daughter-in-law, Lucy. Whereas my heritage is Scots and Irish, Lucy's is English and therefore some of the names I came across were quite different to those found in my own tree. One of my first favourites was a Francis Badger who appeared in the 1851 census for England! He wasn't actually a relative, but an apprentice to Lucy's 3 x great grandfather and who also lodged with the family.  I did wonder how that  surname came about - did the original Badger have  a funnily shaped face? or perhaps a white streak through his hair?? Or was he just an annoying person?? I'll never know, but it was fun to find him! Francis Badger's entry at the bottom in the 1851 census for England. Source: Ancestry.co.uk However, my all time favourite name - and character - from Lucy's tree is a man named Golden Bridge ! He is Lucy's 5x great grandfather and he was born in Essex...

 I was not familiar with the term 'FAN Club' as used in a genealogical sense when I first came across it, so I had to resort to googling the term. I discovered that FAN can stand for 'Friends, Associates and Neighbours' and is yet another 'tool' that can be used in traditional family tree research to learn more about people and the lives that they led. Was this something I had previously used but just been ignorant of the term? Or was this something I could use to further my traditional research? The answer to both of these is yes! Traditional genealogy relies on building out a family tree using information from credible sources/documentation. For example, amongst other things,  a Scottish birth record will list the names of both parents  (if known) and possibly even their date of marriage, a marriage certificate will give the names of the bride and groom's parents and their occupations and whether or not they are still alive, a death certificate will give t...

 My mum, Helen Young Anderson, and dad, John McAra, got married on the 17th of October 1940 at 17 Netherton Road, Wishaw, Helen's parents' house and her home at that time. This was, of course, during World War 2. John, being a civil engineer, was in a 'reserved occupation' and as such was exempt from military service. However, at the time of their marriage, John was working away from his hometown of Cleland, Lanarkshire and living in 'digs' in Hayes, Middlesex. Helen joined him there after their marriage. After the war ended they returned to Wishaw. Marriage certificate of John and Helen The photo below shows the wedding party - bride and groom, best man and bridesmaid. The best man was John's brother, George McAra and the bridesmaid was Helen's younger sister Ann Anderson. When you think of weddings taking place in wartime, you don't imagine the wedding party being dressed up. But as you can see, they all were very smartly dressed. Note the men even...

 My grandfather John Anderson had a variety of jobs throughout his lifetime as had his father, David. David had started off his working life as a miner and ended it as a fish merchant, but along the way he had been a pony driver and a carting contractor. It is the latter profession that he ended up having in common with his son John, though John had started out as a tinsmith and ended up as a tinsmith! In both the 1891 and 1901 censuses, John is described as a tinsmith apprentice. However by the time of his first child's birth in 1909, he is a carting contractor, like his father before him. A carting contractor seems to have been a delivery man, using a horse and cart to deliver or move goods about the town. Unfortunately I have no idea what sorts of goods he moved.  Early local 'motor'   Source: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/pictures-people-places-wishaw-during-4923110 However by 1911 he has moved up  and 'modernised'. John now describes hi...