.

AVAILABLE SCOTTISH GENEALOGY RESOURCES 

Births and baptisms data 
Marriages data
Censuses
Directories & Lists
 

Poorhouses

Occupations
Diseases & Medical terms
DNA Testing
 

Map of Scotland
County map
Parish maps 
Gazetteer 
 

Books & Film
Statistical Accounts of Scotland
Scots Dictionary
 

Research help
Links

Top UK Betting Sites

Stories on Searching for Scottish Ancestors ...........

Pictures of the Ancestors

Photography was never our family's strong point. Grainy looking holidays on the island of Arran, and out-of-focus picnics on days in the Pentland Hills bear testimony to this. The nearest we had to a family album was an oak drawer in the front room cabinet stuffed with pictures of uncertain vintage, usually still in their yellow Kodak wallets.

When later I started taking an interest in where my family came from, I began to ask older aunts and uncles for their family stories, and their photographs. Like so many others my interest in ancestry started only after all four grandparents had passed on. Typical mistake. But my aunts and uncles could tell me snippets - about the young John McGrath who had joined up to fight in the Boer War and never returned; about Uncle Lawrence Ramsay and his family who sailed to Canada in 1912, fortunately for them not on the Titanic; about great grandmother Nellie Leask who left Orkney for Leith after being badly kicked by the farm cow.

And did they have photos of all this ? No, no classic 19th century prints, no studio portraits of Edwardian families, and no crofting scenes from Orkney either. But the bits and pieces they did have were not without interest, and some of them were even in focus. There stood my grandfather Thomson looking proud and confident in his khaki uniform in 1914; there a young couple sitting on a grassy knoll in the countryside in their Sunday best -where did you get that hat? - were my courting grandparents;  and a picture of a silver-haired lady in black sitting primly on a wooden bench in front of a garden shed somewhere in Leith. Yes, that octogenarian was the young Orkney girl who had been kicked by a cow.

Meagre pickings? Perhaps, but with these first building blocks - the family memories, the oldest photographs - I could begin to form mental pictures or images of what the lives of my family ancestors were really like. Of course there was much work still to be done in researching and sourcing the data on names and dates and occupations, and taking the family lines back as far as possible. The detective work had begun.

After a year I had my Scots family tree stretching back for five or more generations, on a few lines back to the late 1600's. And found that my Orkney, Shetland and Border ancestors had gathered some Irish, English, Canadian and German genes along the way. No more photographs, but to better imagine their life and times I sourced scores of historical photographs and prints of people and places of their area. So now I have lots of pictures of my family ancestors - and they are all in my mind's eye.

.....................................................................................................................................................

 This article by Dr Brian Thomson of Scot Roots was first published on the web in the Scottish Radiance magazine in June 2000.

If you would like a story from your family history published here please send to   stories@scotlandsfamily.com for consideration . From 200 words to 500 words max please.
 

If you have found the resources in Scotlands Family helpful, you may wish to Add us to your favourites,  or link to us from your  website.

And feel free to if you have discovered other useful Scottish genealogy resources that could  usefully be  highlighted within ScotlandsFamily.com 

Home      Births and Baptisms    Marriages         Censuses     Directories & Lists     Poorhouses         Occupations      Diseases & Medical     Map of Scotland         County map     Parish maps     Gazetteer      Books        Statistical Accounts     Scots Dictionary    Research help             Links