Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History. Anthony Adolph
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Название: Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History
Автор: Anthony Adolph
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Справочная литература: прочее
isbn: 9780007360963
isbn:
Aristocrats, such as John Campbell, fourth Duke of Argyll, shown in this painting by Thomas Gainsborough, have always had the help of sennachies or genealogists to record their family history.
have never left may know a lot about the ancestors you have in common, and might have tales about your forbears who migrated away.
What you are told will be a mixture of truth, confused truth and the odd white lie. Write it all down and resolve discrepancies using original sources. Watch out for ‘honorary’ relatives. Whilst writing this, I received an email telling me, ‘I recall as a boy, being introduced to people named to me as Uncle Ned, Auntie Jo, and Cousin Francis. Many years later, I found during my family history searches that none of them were in fact relatives, just very close friends at that time. Yet the oldest relative I was interviewing still described them as Uncle, Auntie, and Cousin, even under my challenge, with the result that I spent many weeks searching records for these people as relatives, and I never found any of them – but I eventually did find them as ordinary individuals shown as living in the same neighbourhood.’
Photographs of family holidays are particularly valuable when people used the time to retrace their roots. Alexandrina (‘Alice’) MacLeod left her ancestral home in Badnaban, Sutherland, to become a servant in Glasgow, marrying Walter Hooks there in 1935. They came back on holiday, bringing along Walter’s parents: here she is with her parents-in-law and sister Annie at nearby Achmelvish. There is more on tracing the roots of this family on pp. 50-1. (Photo courtesy of MacLeod Family Collection.)
The internet
Genealogy has been revolutionized by computers, bringing data and even images of records to your own home and, more significantly, making them really easy to search. Being able to look at the whole Scottish 1851 census online is useful: being able to search it in seconds for your great-granny is revolutionary. Scotland has led the way in making its national records accessible and searchable online, and the website www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk is a unique resource that has changed the face of Scottish genealogy for ever. It is your great good fortune to be tracing your Scottish family history now.
Computers are readily available in libraries or internet cafés (or friends’ houses!). If you don’t use the internet already, I would strongly recommend learning from a friend or joining a class, as it will make tracing your Scottish roots vastly easier. If you absolutely can’t bear the idea, ask an internet-savvy friend or relative to do your look-ups for you.
LEFT: A page from www.genesreunited. com showing a list of references to ancestors called Lachlan MacLeod. You can tell which may be relevant by the years and places of birth: by clicking on the name you can send an email to the person who submitted the information.
There are several excellent websites that put like-minded genealogists in touch with each other, particularly the British-based www.genesreunited.com, though sites such as the American www.onegreatfamily.com will contain many families of Scottish descent too. You enter names, dates and places for your family, and the sites tell you if anyone else has entered the same details. When new people join and enter the same relatives, they’ll easily find you. It’s a new method, that really works.
RIGHT: The front page of the ScotlandsPeople website.
Doctor Who’s Dutch cousin
TOP: The marriage proclamation of David Tennant’s great-great-great-grand parents in 1824 reads: Alexr McDonald and Isabella King, both of this Parish, Paid 4s/ to the poor’s funds. No Objections offered Proclaimed 31st Octr 7 Novr This entry employs a number of abbreviations, for the months and also Alexander’s name. It was found on the ScotlandsPeople website, but only after using the Soundex option (see p. 49), as he was indexed as ‘Alexr’, not ‘Alexander’.
LEFT: David Tennant.
Joining a contact website such as Genes Reunited is seldom a waste of effort. Kenny Graham, who lives in the Netherlands, had been tracing his mother’s MacDonald family tree since about 1990, and a few years ago put it on Genes Reunited. His children never took much interest in it until an email arrived from me. ‘Suddenly,’ wrote Kenny, ‘Daddy’s “boring” hobby became cool.’
I was tracing the family tree of David Tennant, the West Lothian-born actor who is the latest incarnation of science fiction hero Doctor Who. David’s real name is David MacDonald. His father, Alexander, Moderator of the Church of Scotland, was the great-grandson of John MacDonald, son of Alexander MacDonald, a road labourer at Kilmadock, who married Isabella King at Lecropt, Co. Perth, in 1824.
I wanted to see if David had any relatives out there, so I looked these ancestors up on Genes Reunited, and found their names had been entered by Kenny, whose great-great-grandfather Peter MacDonald was another son of Alexander and Isabella’s.
‘I couldn’t believe it when we got the email,’ said Kenny, ‘because it is not every day you find out that David Tennant is your fourth cousin!’ His son Ben, nine, was even more excited: ‘When I told my friends a few believed me but most of them didn’t. It seems a bit different watching David on TV now because I try to imagine what he is like in real life.’ His sister Kirsty, aged seven, said, ‘I was really surprised when I found out. My friends didn’t believe me but when they found out it was true they were amazed. My friends and I made a Doctor Who Club at school where we talk about the last episode.’ Kenny told me that ‘this experience has helped us greatly in keeping the children aware of their “Scottishness” and also brought to life my hobby to my siblings.’
RIGHT: The Graham family (courtesy of K. Graham).
Original records
Original records are usually held in the archives of the organization that created them, or in public repositories, local or national. As it is not always practical to visit an archive, there are other options:
1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also called the Mormon Church, has an ever-growing archive of microfilm copies of original records from all over the world, including Scotland, many of which are indexed on the Mormon website www.familysearch.org. Founded in 1830, the Utah-based church has a religious mission СКАЧАТЬ