Roots, shoots and stories

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 ...

 The two great-great grandmothers that I know the least about are my two Irish great-grandmothers, one paternal and one maternal, Sarah Diamond and Jane Chambers. That is not surprising since Irish records can be difficult to research and to find. So what do I know of them and what information am I missing? Sarah first appears when she marries my 2 x great grandfather, William Boag in Glasgow in 1819. Both were working in the textile industry. Source: Scotlands People Their marriage in the Gorbals was conducted by an independent minister, the significance of which was lost on me at the time but became clearer once I started looking for the baptismal records of her children, whom I had found in the 1841 census for Eaglesham, where William was a cotton spinner. I couldn't find her children in the Parish baptimal records and  it was only when I checked the Catholic records that I found her them! That suggested that Sarah was an Irish Catholic and why her marriage to William had ...

When in 2001 my father in law Jan Stepek had the first of a series of strokes, my husband Martin realised that if Jan died, he would not know much about his past. Martin already knew some basic facts about his father's early life: Jan had been born and raised on a farm in Eastern Poland, he and his family were deported when WW2 broke out, his mother had died during the deportation period and somehow later on he served in the Polish Navy. The bare bones of a story which Martin has only recently fully told in his book "Jan Stepek  Part 1 : Gulag to Glasgow". So... Martin determined that if his father recovered sufficiently, he would ask him to share the whole story of his early life. Thankfully this was the case. And what a story emerged! As well as interviewing his father, Martin interviewed and filmed his father's two sisters who had also been deported. This meant he had three different perspectives. Over and above this, he researched online and discovered various key...

In these times, when immigration is very much in the news and immigrants and descendants of immigrants often badly thought of by many of the general public, it is worth remembering that many British people today are themselves the descendants of immigrants. This is especially true in Scotland for those people who claim Irish ancestry. Although there has been immigration from Ireland to Scotland for thousands of years, it reached its peak in the 1800s and was at its highest following the Great Famine (1845-1852). In the years leading up to this disaster, there had been many other years of crop failure too and there is no doubt that this was a factor in the flood of Irish immigrants who came over to Scotland. Famished boy and girl turning up the ground to seek for a potato to appease their hunger in Ireland . James  The Illustrated London News, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I have an Irish great great grandmother on my maternal side and an Irish 3 x great grandmother on my pat...