Roots, shoots and stories

 I have written about my 2 x great grandparents, William Boag and Sarah Diamond, on previous occasions. Irish born Sarah had always been a bit of a mystery, since her origins were obscure and the fact that she disappears from records after 1841. Her husband William remarried and I have his death certificate, certified by his second 'wife' (more missing records as I can't find any record of this marriage either!), who supplied the names of both of William's parents (Thomas Boag and Mary McNeil) and his father's profession - Royal Navy Seaman. William had been born in Greenock in the late 1700s. The name Boag is quite a common one in and around that area and names like William and Thomas were common too. There is no record of a marriage between a Thomas Boag (and various spellings) and a Mary McNeil anywhere in Scotland. However, there is one William who seems to be born around the right time to a Thomas Boag and a Janet Alexander.  So various scenarios are possible i...

 My great-grandfather, John McAra, was born on the 19th of February 1827, the illegitimate son of John McAra (27), a hammerman at the local ironworks and Jane Gregory, aged 17. John and Jane never married - nor could they, as John had gotten married three months earlier to an Elizabeth Gray! Elizabeth herself gave birth to a daughter, Mary, in the May of 1827. It does not take a mathematician to work out that Jane and Elizabeth were both pregnant at the same time! It is easy to build a narrative around the circumstances that John found himself in - two women expecting his child, marrying one of them while both were pregnant. Was he coerced into the marriage, with or without Elizabeth's parents knowing about Jane? Whatever situation he found himself in, he did not shy away away from it. He is named as the father to my great grandfather on the parish baptismal record and who of course, carries his name. Interestingly, John's brother Thomas, married Elizabeth Gray's sister Mar...

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...

 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...

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...

 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 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...

 John Bradfute was born in 1763 at Dunsyre in South Lanarkshire, the second son of the Church of Scotland minister, the Rev. James Bradfute, and grandson of my 5 x great grandfather, also Rev. James Bradfute (1680-1758). As a second son, it is unlikely that John was going to follow his father, grandfather and great grandfather before him into the ministry. His elder brother, James, indeed did so, becoming an ordained priest in the Church of England in 1786. James had been a Deacon at Rose Castle in Cumbria before becoming a priest at Auckland Castle in County Durham. John, however, chose a different path.  At the age of 18, John became apprenticed to Edinburgh printer, Alexander Kincaid. Nine years later, he was taken as a partner into the printing and bookseller business by his mother's brother, John Bell (also son of a minister). John Bell had himself once been at apprentice to Kincaid, but had started up in business by himself in 1771. So it was in 1789 that John Bradfute b...

The Battle of Arbroath, one of Scotland's bloodiest battles, was fought in the summer of 1345 between rival claimants to the post of Baillie of the Regality. The Baillie of the Regality chosen by the monks of Arbroath Abbey at that time was Alexander Lindsay. This post gave Lindsay power and prestige and he was responsible for upholding the law in the lands around the abbey. However, like many men in positions of authority both past and present, he chose to abuse his position of power and his fighting men caused mayhem within the walls of the Abbey. This led to the monks deciding to replace Lindsay with Alexander Ogilvy, who had hereditary claims to the position, but who unfortunately was Lindsay's enemy ... and my 15 x great-uncle! His sister, Isobel had married into Clan Oliphant and, on paper at least, Isobel is my 15 x great grandmother! Of course, the appointment of Ogilvy was not acceptable to Lindsay, who then raised an army of 1000 men and marched to Arbroath Abbey to r...

One set of my paternal  2 x great grandparents cause me somewhat of a headache!  The paper trail from my great grandmother Mary Boag, shows her parents were William Boag and Sarah Diamond. William was a cotton spinner and at the time of Mary's birth in 1829, the family were living in Eaglesham. By 1838, the couple had had ten children. They had been married in Glasgow by an independent minister - William was a Protestant and Sarah an Irish Catholic. All seems normal in 1841. The family are living in Eaglesham, the two eldest sons have followed their father into the cotton spinning trade, a couple of children are no longer there - possibly have died. But by the time of the next census in 1851, William is no longer in Eaglesham and no longer with Sarah. He is living in Glasgow, no longer a cotton spinner but a 'light porter' and there is a new spouse, a Margaret Muir, who was born in Eaglesham and a 9 month old son, Joseph. Obviously there was initially some doubt that this w...

 I have previously written about a huge group of DNA matches that I am struggling to link back to anyone in my family tree ( So many descendants ), a so-called 'Unlinked Family Cluster'. I have spent so, so many hours on trying to solve what I term my 'Mormon' puzzle and getting nowhere. I have identified many of these individuals as descendants of a Scottish couple living in Lanarkshire, Scotland, Elizabeth Russell and Thomas Archibald, who became Mormons.  After Thomas died, Elizabeth set out for America with her children, arriving in Utah in 1862. By the time of her death, Elizabeth had 118 grandchildren and 277 great grandchildren. It is no wonder that I have such a huge number of DNA matches whose paper trail lead back to her. Some of my groups from Ancestry. You can see how the huge Archibald group stands out. Identifying Elizabeth and her her husband as the common ancestral couple for a lot of these DNA matches was a step in the right direction, but only the firs...

 When I first started researching my family tree it was early in the 1980s. My dad was still alive, so I remember asking him to tell me about his siblings and parents.  I knew he had been the youngest in the family. At that time, I also knew he had two living sisters, Agnes and Jean, two living brothers, Will and George and had a sister who had died, Mary (Polly). It was only then that he told me he had had other siblings - other six in fact, four of which he had never known, and two who had died as adults. My dad had never spoken about them to me before. Nor had he spoken to me about his parents - his dad had died many years before I was born and his mum had died when I was only three. So that was starting point, to fill in a family tree with any information I could find about those grandparents and my dad's siblings. Of course, it was much harder then than it is nowadays to find records. Firstly you had to physically go to the registry office - in my case, New Register House...

 In Scotland, Hogmanay, the 31st of December, is synonymous with bringing in the New Year. As a child, I can remember staying up until midnight for 'the bells', getting a small glass of non-alcoholic raspberry 'wine' and a piece of sultana cake, waiting to see who would be our 'first foot' (the first person to come over the threshold of the house in the New Year, hopefully someone tall, dark and handsome for good luck!) before being hustled off to bed. And that would be the end of my evening. Earlier on that day/evening, my mum would have been busy. She was a great baker and would have made sultana cake and cherry cake, which she would have cut up into fingers. She bought in shortbread and also a sticky dark fruit cake called 'Black Bun', which I hated but which was my dad's favourite. The raspeberry 'wine' that I mentioned earlier would have been made by her too from a bottle of raspberry cordial, which was only sold in the shops in the run ...

On my 2 x great grandfather John Young's death certificate, his father is listed as James Young and his mother as a Helen Ravelton. John died at the age of 78 and was a widower. His son James was a witness on the death certificate and both of John's parents were marked as deceased. Ravelton is not a common name and therefore you would expect researching Helen in the Parish records to be relatively easy, even when you consider its various spellings - Ravelton/Revelton/Raveltoun. However, with names getting passed on down through families, mix-ups can occur and this is what has happened in Helen's case and has led to lots of trees having the wrong Helen, the wrong dates or the wrong parents. Many even have the wrong James Young as her husband! I myself have also made mistakes in researching her and her husband James Young - James Young is a very common name in this area and indeed throughout Scotland. In my case too, the Youngs and the Raveltons are also closely connected. It...

 My late father-in-law, Jan Stepek, was brought up on a farm in Poland in the 1920s. He never had the opportunity to play football as a child or even watch a game. All the more ironic, therefore, that four decades later he would be the Chairman and main owner of a professional football club in Scotland. When he arrived in Scotland, he quickly learned that football was a national passion. But he paid no attention to it. However, in 1969, he found himself drawn into a crisis concerning the local football club - Hamilton Academical - or "Accies" as they are better known. By this time Jan was one of Hamilton's and Scotland's best known businessmen. One day, his next door neighbour who was a shareholder in the club, knocked on Jan's front door. Over a drink, the neighbour explained that the directors of the football club had agreed to merge with another local club, Clyde FC. This would mean that Hamilton Academical would cease to exist. A minority of the Board disagree...