Pride!

It is quiet in the office here at the moment and I have been browsing on the internet. I put our postcode into ‘Google Streetview’ and find that the property coming up is a bungalow which has been lying empty for several months and consequently shabby looking. Our home is a couple of hundred yards north of that spot but there are no other houses around and we share the same postcode. I find myself wanting to let you know that the house you see is not mine! Pride I think -but a good lesson in not jumping to quick conclusions about what we see be it advertisements or that tantalising ancestry.com connection we have emailed to us!

Rose bush at our garden gate

Cyclone reaching Cairns, Victoria.

Since starting Scottish Ancestral Trail I have been very aware of the different countries so closely associated with Scotland. The visitors we have had from overseas have made the world a much smaller place.

I heard this morning from Cairns in Australia as they wait for the cyclone to reach them. They are well prepared and waiting…… It stops me complaining about our weather in Moffat.

Peter Chalmers – our ‘Edinburgh Guide’

This is the first time I have written here in 2011 – so Happy New Year would be appropriate – maybe somewhat belatedly. Everything over the festive season was rather disrupted though.  The heavy snowfalls meant that many people were unable to be where they had expected to be over Christmas and the prolonged cold weather made me hibernate for longer still. I have only just wished wished Peter Chalmers a ‘Guid New Year’.

Peter and myself in Edinburgh

Peter is a highly regarded, retired, Edinburgh military gentleman who in his retirement does guiding work for us.  Most people who have been on holidays with us will have met him.  He is a repository of knowledge about Edinburgh, it’s buildings and its historic inhabitants.  As Peter was unwell last year I had planned to visit before Christmas with a box of biscuits. Ice, snow and the general mayhem prevented me from making the trip to Edinburgh so it was not ’til yesterday that I made my way, with my by now tattered parcel – how is it that Christmas presents delivered late look so messy!

On his wall Peter has a copy of a John Ainslie map of Edinburgh drawn in the 1780s.  He found the original  himself in a bundle of books brought into the RCAHMS building in Edinburgh.  It was a great find as it was a map that was unknown. They promptly to 4 copies of it and in gratitude to Peter gave him one!  Quite something to have hanging on your wall.

We use the map library of Scotland ourselves as a resource for visitors tracing their ancestors homes.  Searching old maps is a great way to while away the time and has the element of detective work in it.

Peter gave me a New Year kiss yesterday, so I feel the year has started.

Christmas Cards – Names and Places.

History is recorded in place names round the world.

We visited New Zealand several years ago and as we travelled we recognised the names or Scottish towns and villages. Names cropped up in almost every township or farm name. It is a strange but comforting feeling of being at home while actually being far from home. I can sympathise with the desire to take your familiar and familial names from Scotland when you move thousands of miles away.

I read yesterday that the second biggest town in Liberia is called Buchanan.which is a very kent name to me as my mother was a Buchanan. To my knowledge Buchanan is not a place name here, just a family name.

Today I have been writing some Christmas cards and that has really brought it home to me. I was writting to relatives who have built a home in the Barossa Valley in Australia which they have called – Abbotsford – named after a Crescent in Edinburgh from which they emmigrated and also the name of the home of Sir Walter Scott in the Scottish Borders. Another cousin who lived outside Johanesburgh and was descended from Scottish Border farmers was himself known as Tweed which is the name of the River which flows through the family farm in Scotland and the farm fields in Johanesburgh were named after the Border towns in Scotland.

Maybe it would be fun to come to Scotland to see the place where your town name originated!

Checking your sources!

My husband, Peter,  has been mumbling to himself in the kitchen. Well that’s not new!

He is reading out  text from a small book written a hundred years ago by an ancestor of his about his family.  The book was given by the author, Thomas Helm, to his niece (?) Peter’s mother when she was a lot younger and she is now 92.  The question mark about their relationship is hers.

The text Peter is reading out is:- ‘my mother Euphemia Helm nee Hunter’.  At the same time Peter is leafing through his family history records with a computer screen open in front of him.  You probably know the sort of thing…..  Mumble, mumble, ‘Euphemia Helm nee Hunter’ . Then he announced ‘something’s wrong – someone’s given me wrong information’.  Ahhaa yes, well that is what happens – go to the original records yourself and don’t just take people words for it – the mind plays tricks and when we write down the precious memories of relatives they may well have names and the generations mixed.

Or then there is the typing error.

Caroline Makein, of ‘Fife Rootsearch’,  a professional Scottish genealogist once told me of something which happened to her.  When searching for information about one of her own ancestors she came across dates which were quite wrong.  When she unearthed where the wrong information had come from she found it was from a typing error she had made herself.  Of course the erroneous information was already out there in the ether getting itself quoted and copied into other peoples records.  No doubt someone,  somewhere, is mumbling to themselves in their kitchen ‘someone’s given me wrong information’.  Check your original sources seems to be the byword for family history research.

Wigtown Book Festival

We’re just home from a short stay in Wigtown in ‘The Machars’ in the west of the south of Scotland. I’m pleased that we’d arranged some accommodation and were able to spend  time just looking round and taking in the atmosphere because it’s a strangely remote  point of land which gives you a feeling of being disjointed from the rest of Scotland or even from the rest of the world.  We were at the Book Festival meeting authors and buying books.  Maybe it was through listening to Roddy Martine speaking about the book he has just written entitled – Hunted Scotland – that I experienced the strange isolation of the area.  Then again maybe it is just auto suggestion! The scenery is richly green just now and with the stormy rain and striking mountainous backdrop we had some glowery sky above us at times!  We drove to Whithorn  the birthplace of Scottish Christianity and the site of the earliest Christian Church founded here in in the early 5th century by the now sainted St. Ninian.  The the identity of  Ninian is in some doubt but the settlement he established there is extensive.

The ruins of St. Ninians Chapel - Whithorn

The festival was great fun and the streets of Wigtown were alive with people then emptied when we all went in to see our chosen authors. Came home with new reading material having listened to lots of thought provoking conversation – and eaten some good food into the bargain.

September – summer in Scotland is cooling off

The children have gone back to school after the summer holidays and today the rain has been falling fast and furiously.  However the temperatures are still fairly mild during the day though the nights are getting chilly.  But you don’t come to Scotland for the weather as they say!

Last night we ate out at our local Italian restaurant and sat beside a couple who had spent a holiday in Scotland.  They had had a wonderful time and couldn’t speak highly enough about the friendly hospitality of the cheerful Scots.     I love these comments and they should be broadcast everywhere.  We don’t need great weather we have great folk!

Off to America?

Peter, my husband is reading – A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland – which was written by Samuel Johnson in the mid 1700s when he and Boswell toured Scotland and each wrote their personal accounts of the country and people north of the England/Scotland border. The book is full of interesting references – which Peter interrupts my daydreaming by reading to me! The language needs a bit of getting used to but his account is full of interesting observations. In this case it is about emigration from the Islands of Scotland and is put beautifully I think : the exile he writes about is not forced exile but an exodus from choice but with nothing to loose.

Johnson puts it this way – They who went first, were probably such as could best be spared; but the accounts sent by the earliest adventurers, whether true or false, inclined many to follow them; and whole neightbourhoods formed parties for removal; so that departure from their native country is no longer exile. He that goes thus accompanied, carries with him all that makes life pleasant. He sits down in a better climate, surrounded by his kindred and his friends: they carry with them their language, their opinions, their popular songs, and hereditary merriment: they change nothing but the place of their abode; and of that change they perceive the benefit.

Brightwater Holidays – Scottish Ancestral Trail

The idea of putting ‘genealogy’ into a group tour itinerary seemed difficult but we have cracked it! We have come up with an entirely new concept of using an actor to portray a fictional character to illustrate how his life is recorded through his major life events.

While enjoying a tour of central and southern Scotland you get an occasional chance to ‘meet’ our character who tells you personally of what has been happening to him and how these events are recorded in the Scottish records stored in Edinburgh.

You see the tour on page 19 of their spring brouchure. http://www.brightwaterholidays.com/docs/AUTUMN-SPRING-2010.pdf

For more information contact Brightwater Holidays. http://www.brightwaterholidays.com

American Scottish Foundation

I enjoyed attending a reception hosted by the American Scottish Foundation held in Edinburgh last night and it was great to see so many people interested in promoting and maintaining the links between our two countries.  The fabulous building where the reception was held was originally Edinburgh’s oldest Victorian public baths. It has since been re-invented and is now a huge light and colourful space and it made a lovely venue for our gathering.  Alan Bain the President of the Foundation spoke interestingly about the Foundation’s work and the committment of those working alongside him.