Roots, shoots and stories

The topic of 'random' sent me back looking into my tree for a woman I had come across who had a connection I never would have expected to find in my family tree, a tree  which is full of Central Lowland Scots, Irish and a scattering of English people. The woman in question was Effie Hanchett, a lady born in 1870 in Plymouth, Nebraska, USA. I had come across Effie when I was researching my maternal Adams line. Effie had married a William Henry Adams in Fairbury, Nebraska in 1893 and William is my first cousin three times removed. William's grandfather was my 3 x great grandfather.  Effie Hanchett (1870-1848) Source: shared on Ancestry.com In 1872, William, aged 8 and his younger sister had emigrated from Lanarkshire in Scotland with their parents, William and Marion, to start a new life in America. His father William was a coalminer like many Scots who emigrated at that time and he continued that job when they got to Illinois as can be seen in the 1880 census for La Salle, I...

 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 ...

 Margaret Annie Jean Reid Macmillan, my 'colourful' Aunt Margaret, was born in 1914 in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire to Robert Macmillan, a master plumber from Lanarkshire and his wife, Mary Matheson, a farmer's daughter from the Island of Skye. Margaret was the only daughter, though she did have two elder brothers. Census records show that the family were still living in Grangemouth in 1921 and at this time they also had a boarder lodging with them, a young Norwegian man. Whether he was the Macmillan's first boarder I do not know, but sometime between 1921 and 1930, the family moved to Glasgow, where the Macmillans opened a boarding house in the West End. Margaret and her mother Mary. Source: family photo  In 1935,  still living in her parents' boarding house, Margaret, then aged 21 and working in a shoe store, married George McAra, my father's brother. From this point onwards until George retired, they lived at Sunnyside, a lovely stone built cottage in Cleland, ...

My husband's grandfather, Wladyslaw Stepek, was born in November of 1893, the eldest of nine children. Unlike five of his siblings, Wladyslaw survived childhood, a childhood spent on a small farm in Haczow, a village in present day south-eastern Poland, but at that point in time was occupied by Austria. He had, however, caught tuberculosis as a child and did almost die. His next challenge came when both his parents died and at the age of 19, he found himself an orphan and head of the household. We think at this time he was studying pharmacy at university. However, in the following year1914, everything changed with the onset of World War I. Wladyslaw Stepek Wladyslaw was quickly conscripted into the medical corps of the Austrian army against his wishes as he was a fervent supporter of the resumption of Polish independence. His situation worsened when he was captured by the Russian army in 1915 and sent to Mariupol in present day Ukraine. There he was sent to work in a chemical facto...

 When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...

My husband Martin's ancestors all tended to have big families and the family Martin grew up in was no exception - he had seven brothers and two sisters! Whereas in the past these large families lived in crammed accommodation, despite the size of his family, they had more than enough space, though it could be always be described as a 'full house'. The house in question is a stone built Georgian house from around the 1820s. Martin's father, a successful businessman, knew a bargain when he came across one. When he first saw the house in 1960, it was in a terrible state, with holes in the roof and rotten floorboards. The huge garden was waist high in weeds. He bought it for the sum of £1000 and spent the best part of a year repairing and restoring the house and garden to their former states to be a lovely busy home for his large and growing family.   If ten children and two adults were not enough, his Aunt Mary, a lady with special needs, came to live with them after the de...

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however,  the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...