May 14th, 2009

Hold the line please

The plans o’ mice and men gang aft agley – meaning I had planned all kinds of things to put on this blog by today, and I’ve allowed other things to distract me.  Principal among these was the arrival, from the National Archives, of my great-grandfather’s military service record.  This is a document that I’ve been looking forward to for years and finally it’s here.  I’m ridiculously excited by it.  Hidden among all that army terminology and scrappy nineteenth century writing are the answers to many things about this family, who have been my most elusive.  As I carry their name, and they lived not that long ago, I’ve always felt very frustrated by this.  However, true to form, its arrival has sent me into a spin and I’m wildly writing notes and finding new sources without any real focus.

Anyway, I’ll write more about this later, once I’ve calmed down and deciphered (more…)

May 12th, 2009

Who’s in the photo

This photograph sat atop this blog in its previous incarnation.  Now the blog has a new look, there’s no room for it in that position.  But it’s such a great photo I can’t not include it.

I picked it for two reasons – one, it’s got loads of relatives in it and two, I could easily make the image the right size (albeit at the expense of the poor folk at the back, who have had their heads chopped off!).

I’ll introduce you to all (more…)

May 7th, 2009

Smile for the camera

Through a Twitter contact, I saw this and immediately thought of an old photo I have of my great-great grandfather which I’m going to submit.

It’s a studio portrait from the 1930s and he’s wearing his best tweed bunnet and watch chain.  With him is his dog, whose name was Rover. I see that Rover is wearing not only a collar but what looks like an identity disc. I don’t know what occasioned the visit to the photographer in Hamilton and why he took the dog with him (more…)

Apr 15th, 2009

The pound in your sporran

I was talking on the phone yesterday to a local history librarian and learned something I had no idea of.

Apparently, old Scottish currency was not on a par with English sterling.  The Bank of Scotland was set up in 1695, primarily to help develop Scotland’s trade, mainly with England and the Low Countries. It began business in February 1696 with a working capital of £120,000 Scots (£10,000 Sterling). And after the Union in 1707, no more Scottish coinage was issued. Today, the Bank of Scotland, that august institution, is a casualty of the economic meltdown.

The old coinage included groats, bonnets (more…)

Apr 14th, 2009

Mors

In my family history research using old church registers, I’ve been coming across some marvellous archaic terms.  One is a mortcloth.  First large mortcloth, second large mortcloth, first small morcloth, second small mortcloth and even velvit [velvet] mortcloth.  The word appears on death records and has a price attached.  In my ignorance, I thought it might be the cost of a shroud to bury a person in, but I’m only half right. Googling it, I found this.

A mortcloth (from the Latin word mors, mortis, meaning ‘death’) was a form of pall, i.e. a large cloth (usually black) thrown over a coffin or corpse at a funeral. Mortcloths were kept by kirk (more…)

Apr 13th, 2009

I was here

After a few years of neglect, I’ve gone back to doing my family history research.  It costs a fortune (few data resources are free these days, sigh) and takes up inordinate amounts of time. Now I’ve got a gedcom file (afficiandos will understand) that comprises 1242 individuals, all related to me in some way.  My direct ancestors (all those Great Grandparents to the power of n) amount to 104 people, stretching back into the 1600s.  Their blood (and genes) runs in my veins.  Almost without exception, they were dirt poor and undistinguished.  Their lives must have been harder than I can even imagine.  They’d be disdainful of the soft life I lead.  Some of the women are especially interesting – brave, tough women who brought up housefuls of children without a man, or bore a child while rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

In the midst of all this data-gathering and detective work (that’s why it’s fascinating, of course, it’s your very own detective story and you have to pick up clues where you are and piece them together if you can) I sometimes stop to think why I’m doing it.  I know that it’s important enough to me that I’m thinking of putting it (more…)

Oct 5th, 2008

The Indian connection

I’ve done a lot of work through the years on my family’s history.  Unable to contain myself, I’ve gone spinning off into distant cousins of great-great-grandfathers and the like, fascinated by the spreading web of family. Recently, I’ve begun to look at it again, and to focus on the couple who were my paternal great-grandparents.

He was a coalminer turned soldier, she the daughter of a soldier. The twist is that he served in the British Army in India, where he married her when she was aged only fourteen. And I think that her ancestry wasn’t totally British. Curiously, there appear to be no children from this marriage until five years later.  That was very unusual in those days. I wonder if he was posted away from home immediately after the marriage, or there were children, but these died from some tropical disease (cholera was very much a fact of life then).

He was posted back to England and their first child was born on the way in Cape Town. There were to be at least twelve (more…)