Roots, shoots and stories

Looking back from a future I will never know, what will my descendants know about ME? I will have left quite a substantial family tree for immediate future generations, if they are able to access it, so they will know that at the very least I was the family historian/storyteller. My children know quite a bit about my early life and we are close, so I feel they know me well. If they have children, will they pass on what they know? Will their children even be interested? And as for generations after that, the immediate knowledge will diminish and may even be lost sooner than I think. I can't start to imagine the amount of information I could have had even about my own parents had I thought to ask them while I still could, never mind my grandparents or great grandparents. Lives all gone, lifetimes forgotten. And what have I discovered about MYSELF in doing this #52ancestors challenge? I have learned that I like the discipline of 'having to' produce a piece of writing on a give...

 Growing up I knew I had lots of cousins. I was also a bit confused as to why a lot of the ones on my dad's side of the family had the same name. I am Christine, but I had four cousins called Christina. It was only later on, I realised we had all been named after my dad's mum, Christina Barr Walker, with all of us being given middle names of Barr or Walker or both.  I didn't get to know these cousins well as they were all so much older than me. My dad had been the youngest of the twelve children my grandparents had and these twelve children's births spanned 26 years. The eldest of my 'Christina' cousins, Christina Walker Clinton, was born in 1917 - making her 40 years old when I was born! The other three were born in 1922, 1930 and 1932! Christina (Chrissie) Clinton's sons (my first cousins once removed)  were born in 1936 and 1938 - so, despite being a generation of a difference, they were also 'too old' for me to get to know, although I was a flowe...

I have already written about my 3 x great uncle, James McAra, who was sentenced to deportation at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1811. His crime had been to attack his brother, my 3 x great grandfather, Alexander, with an iron bar during an argument, with Alexander being badly hurt and dying a few days later. James was an iron worker by trade in Scotland and continued this trade in the small town of Sorell in Tasmania.  We cannot know much about the life he led in Sorell, but he is mentioned in a variety of documents. For example we know he was given a Free Pardon by the Governor of Tasmania and New South Wales in 1836. He also acquired some land in 1839, which, in his Will, he left to daughters of a friend. We know his affection for 'drink', which had led to the fatal fight back in Scotland, never left him as 'excessive drinking' was given as cause of death on his death certificate. However his tombstone bears witness to the fact he was well-liked and a 'good and h...

My friends and family know I enjoy baking. I grew up watching my mum baking every week. She baked for the family, of course, but she also baked for the church, for the bowling club and even for my own school events when I was a teacher. She seemed to love producing cakes, cupcakes, traybakes, pies.. not just a few a a time, but dozens - enough to fill a baker's wooden tray.  She had worked in a baker's shop before she got married and her own mother, my grandmother, had had a love of baking too. It was something that obviously got passed on to her and then to me.  I remember that every Hallowe'en, she would bake a 'clootie dumpling' - a steamed fruit 'pudding' wrapped in cloth. Inside the dumpling she would have wrapped small coins or trinkets in grease proof paper and it was always great fun to see if the slice that was cut for you had a wrapped coin in it. Nowadays that would contravene 'Health and Safety'! For Christmas too, she would bake her Chri...

One man's 'troublemaker' can be another man's hero. One of my 20th great-grandfathers was such a man.  And a famous one at that! Robert the Bruce, King Robert I of Scotland for the last two decades of his life, was certainly a troublemaker in the eyes of the English. An ardent proponent for Scottish Independence, he is best known for defeating the English Army at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. After Bannockburn, he was not content to just defend Scotland, but actively led incursions into the north of England. Nowadays he is still revered as one of Scotland's heroes. Image from www.factinate.com But this wasn't always the case. Many Scots had cause to see him as a troublemaker too - or  at times, even worse, a traitor.  When, in 1296,  the then King John Balliol required all able bodied Scots to fight against the English, Robert was one of several Scottish nobles to ignore the summons. Notably then the first city attacked by Balliol's troops was Carlisle,...

My direct ancestry is not at all exotic. Although my percentage ethnicities do vary a bit from one testing company to another, one thing is clear: I am very, very Scottish. 23andme have me as 99.5% Scottish/Irish, Ancestry at 71% Scottish, 27% Irish. The Irish I know comes to me through one 2 x great grandmother on my maternal side and one 3 x great grandmother on my paternal side. I do have one 3 x great grandfather who was English, but everywhere else you look on my tree it is Scotland all the way, and Central Scotland at that too.  All my direct ancestors for the last two hundred years are all Lanarkshire born! It appears that my ancestors were quite happy to stay in Scotland, only moving relatively locally to improve their chances of work. The coalfields of Lanarkshire proved an attractive prospect for people who had been iron workers and general labourers. The cotton mills also provided work for many of them. These people benefited from the start of the Industrial Revolution a...

Although I do have a couple of direct ancestors who were farmers, they lived back in the late 18th - early 19th century and I haven't yet found information on their farms. So this week I'm going to come closer to home and write a little bit about my Uncle Will, William McAra (1901-1983).  As a child, after being at church with my mum on a Sunday, my dad would pick us both up and we would drive a few miles up the road to visit my Uncle Will and Aunt Inez. They lived on a small holding and raised chickens. These small holdings dated from just after WW2 when the government were trying to encourage food production post war. Pre-war, Uncle Will, like his father and elder brothers before him, had worked in the local mines. I  remember getting really excited one day, being taken into a big building where there were hundreds of fluffy yellow chicks. This building would have been the brooder house. The chicks were bought in when they were a day old and kept in the brooder house until t...