How I caught the genealogy bug
There was always a mystery about my mother’s paternal grandmother. The family mantra was, ‘Oh, she just went away. We don’t speak about her.’
After my mother was widowed, she had a deep need to reach back into her past and solve this mystery. She asked me to try and find what had happened to her grandmother. Inwardly I rolled my eyes heavenwards- this was not something that appealed to me at all. All that work, and for what?
But, she was my mother - and you can’t say no to your mother!
What followed was so unexpected
The first challenge was finding the energy to go through the motions when I had such little enthusiasm for the project. But in no time at all - I was hooked. It was detective work, and I like a good detective story!
I remember so clearly the excitement I felt when I located the missing grandmother’s birth certificate, her marriage papers, her appearances in the censuses of first Glasgow and then Liverpool. Don’t forget; this was in the days pre-internet when I had to travel to find records.
Finding the houses and the graves
Once I had compiled a substantial amount of information, I took my mother to Liverpool. And in this, I found another enormous pleasure of Family Research- actually going to the places where ancestors lived. On one occasion, we were invited into the house where the missing grandmother had lived over a century earlier. It was fascinating - history in action. Another place of inspiration and connection are cemeteries. In finding where our ancestors lay, our family story grew. I was fascinated by the stories that lay deep in the earth—intrigued by the never-ending questions:
Who were these people?
What did they do?
How did they think?
That sent me scurrying into a whole range of archive materials. The detective work and investigation of genealogy had hooked me in for good.
Researching family trees for other people
I raved to friends about this newfound excitement in my life, as character after character came alive. One day a friend asked me to research her family tree.
I wasn’t sure - could I do this for other people? Would I find the same kind of thrill over someone else’s long lost relatives as I did my own? Thankfully - the answer was yes. The excitement of the chase was just the same. The people I found became as real as those in my own family. That is how I began to do research, and I have never looked back. Individual pieces of work, histories of who have lived in houses and crucial figures in communities always varied, but one aspect never changes. I always am drawn into the stories I uncover.
Making connections between places and time
As a Blue Badge guide, I know Scotland well. I know its story, and when I am researching families, I go beyond the computer available records. Why did a family emigrate when they did? What made them choose that particular year rather than a year later? Often national events played a large part in the decision making, rather than simply a family decision. Newspapers, Church records, criminal records can offer answers to these questions.
Revealing shocking family secrets
A lesson I learned early on was taking care of the secrets I unearthed. Often, family secrets are buried for a reason. When I unearth them, it is fascinating for me as the family researcher, but the truth can be uncomfortable for the family members.
I know this only too well from my family history...
I had more or less given up on the missing grandmother when by chance, I stumbled on an idea online. Off I went again. After a little more investigating, there she was—I’d found her death certificate, but under an entirely different name.
From there, I unearthed her marriage certificate, but there had been no divorce from the first marriage to my mother’s grandfather. She had married bigamously. In all our searches of death, divorce, passenger manifests, asylums, neither my mother nor I had ever thought of that one. A lesson learned!
Sadness and excitement of genealogy
As much as I say I enjoy detective work and getting to the heart of the facts, it’s not always a happy ending for those I’m trying to locate.
One family I researched had a young woman who was widowed twice before she was 23. The rest of the family seemed to turn their backs on poor Anne, and in despair, with her three children, she went for help. She was sent to the Poorhouse, and on her notes was written:
‘Look strictly after her as she will dodge you if she can, leave the children and go and co-habit with whoever she can find.’
Sadly, just six months later, she was found dead in the streets of consumption. The children had been shipped off to America to work; orphans were a financial burden.
Meeting your heroes
I have unearthed real treasure at other times - perhaps for me even more than for the family who hires me.
In an Argyllshire village in the mid-nineteenth century, there was resistance to people being cleared from their homes to develop industrial-scale farming. One man stood out as an influential leader of this resistance.
I had been asked to research a family tree, and as I went back, I came to the same name as that of this leader. Could it be the same person? Was I researching for someone who did not know his ancestor had been a mighty rebel? I found it hard to believe this particular story didn’t get passed down through the generations.
And yet I wondered - the family I was working for were not rebels, far from it. They were comfortably off, respectable figures. Had he been written out of the family lore? I had to find out.
The man in the family tree was married and had signed his marriage certificate. He was literate! Was it possible that the man who was taken to trial had signed his name, and if so would the signatures match?
Off to the National Records of Scotland. I ordered up the trial records and had to wait for over an hour for them to arrive from the box where they may not have been looked at in decades.
I was shaking with excitement as I opened the document. And there it was. I asked the archivist to look at the two signatures, and he agreed. This was the same man.
For many years I had been fascinated by the rebellion on the hillside and its articulate leader. How special for me that I could do the detective work and then look at one of his descendants.
Blending tour guiding with genealogy for a powerful experience
The real thrill then was to take the family to the hillside and show them where the events had taken place. It was even possible to work out which ruined cottage had been theirs. Marrying the guiding with genealogy gives a width that goes beyond family research. It is possible to link people to local and national events and develop an accurate picture of individuals.
As a Blue Badge Scottish Tourist Guide and with qualifications in Family and Local History from the University of Dundee, I am ideally placed to bring the two areas together.
Just imagine unearthing your family’s secret past
And then explore the exact places where your family’s events took place. When you book me to find your family tree, if I can I’ll take you to the very place - so you can delve deep into the experience, something way beyond a report or document. If you’d love to know more about your own family’s past - contact me to help you with your family tree.