Roots, shoots and stories

Over the course of my many years of research, I have come across a few direct ancestors whose life was not only shaped by their religious beliefs but who actually ministered to those beliefs.  My 7 x great grandfather, John Bradfute, was born in 1639. He graduated with an M.A. from the University of Edinburgh in 1658 and, at some point after that, decided he wanted to become a minister in the Church of Scotland.  He was ordained as the minister at Pettinain, a small parish in present day South Lanarkshire in 1689. On the Scotland's Churches Trust website, the church is described as " a fine example of a rural parish church with outstanding views over open countryside". That might not have changed since John delivered his sermons there.  The original church had been established in the 12th century and the present day church dates from the late 17th century.  Pettinain Church   Source:https://canmore.org.uk/site/47649/pettinain-church John died in 1709 and hi...

 We live in a world where advances in technology are almost taken for granted. It permeates every aspect of our lives. Even as I sit here typing up this genealogy blog, I can remember that when I started my genealogical journey about forty years ago, there were no laptops, no software, no DNA testing. My journey started with a pen and paper, parish registers and librarians! Even going back a generation to my parents, the amount of technological advance they witnessed during their lifetimes was astounding. Here are a few of the ways in which technology impacted their lives and my memories.  My dad was born in 1914 - according to Wikipedia the first affordable mass produced car was only produced in 1913! His parents never had a car, so my dad was part of the first generation to learn to drive and own many cars in their lifetime. (My mum, like many women in her generation, never learned to drive.) My dad was a civil engineer by profession. Initially for calculations, he used a sl...

Martin's maternal grandmother, Mary Ann Pyne married James Murphy in  1914 at the age of 24. At that time she was a laundress and he was a coalminer. They set up home together in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire. Their first child arrived in the October of 1914 and over the next seventeen years, Mary went on to have another eleven children.  Mary Ann Pyne c 1964 Of these twelve children, one, Elizabeth died at the age of four months, and Gerard died aged 51, but all the rest survived into their 70s, 80s, 90s - and Frances even reached her 100th birthday and received her birthday card from the Queen! These were amazing lifespans for these children, given that the older children were raised in cramped accommodation.  Even more amazing is that they were brought up by Mary on her own after her husband James died at the age of 48, leaving her with eight children under the age of 16 and her four older children, one of whom, Mary, had both mental and physical disabilities. Both parents h...

 Although my husband Martin's dad was Polish, Martin and his siblings were brought up in Scotland in a non-Polish speaking household. Polish was only heard when his father's sisters came to the house or spoke on the phone or when other Polish people his father knew visited. His father's sisters had both married Poles and had brought their children up to be bilingual. Martin's mum was a Scot of Irish descent. What a missed opportunity! Now, late on in life, Martin is attempting to learn Polish, but how much easier would it have been for him to have learned it as a child! His lack of Polish language hasn't helped when we have been working on the Polish side of his family tree. Trying to understand the documents held in various repositories has been a challenge. To that end, he has had to seek help from an amateur genealogist from his grandfather's hometown in Poland.  Whilst doing research on his father's early life in Poland and on his Polish grandfather, Mar...

So far in all my years of research I have not come across any ancestors who deliberately changed their names to take on a new identity for one reason or another, though I have come across various spelling changes down through families or poor transcription of official records. However, my husband Martin's 2 x great grandmother is someone whose maiden name appeared in different guises in both her own documentation and that of her children and it was only through collaboration with a DNA match to one of my husbands siblings that we discovered her 'real' maiden name and information that enabled us to get back another two generations. Initially we had her name from her daughter Elizabeth Raycroft's birth certificate - Mary McAllan. Her  own marriage certificate gave her name as Mary McCallum .  Her death certificate gave her father as Thomas Mulholland. Although these names seem very different, the way they would be have been said is important, as different accents can m...

 As a child I remember coming across a strange silver locket - no chain - in my mum's jewellery box. I vaguely remember asking her about it and all I was told was it belonged to my grandmother. After my mum died, I came across it again. I had been intrigued by the engraving on it which seemed be C M. My dad's mum was Christine Walker and her married name was McAra, so this seemed to have been the grandmother referred to.  It is even prettier on the inside. The filigree 'door' can be opened. I found this intriguing. It's not the sort of locket that you can put a photograph in, so what was its purpose? The mystery may have been solved when, about a decade ago now, a friend asked me to accompany her to an antiques valuation and asked if I had anything I wanted to bring along. I decided to take the locket. I was told the locket may or may not have held pleasant scented herbs or something similar, or held a lock of hair or something equally precious. So, I'm not tota...

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...