From time to time, I find that my clients in USA, Canada or Australia had ancestors who lived in miners’ rows in Ayrshire or Midlothian. Understandably, they often plan to come back to Scotland to see where their ancestors lived. But I often have to tell them that they’ll find little or no evidence of […]
Author: adminaa
Annan – gateway to a new life in Canada
In an era before railways, moving around Scotland and England was not easy and in general was prohibitively expensive for many. When times were tough and agricultural labourers were finding it hard to feed their families, their thoughts turned to making a new start by emigrating to the New World. In some cases, financial help […]
Postcards from the Past
My father died earlier this year and I inherited a huge pile of Edwardian postcards which had been handed down the generations. Most of the cards were published by Raphael Tuck and Sons. I decided to find out a bit more about the company. Raphael Tuck was a Prussian immigrant who, together with his wife, […]
Eskdalemuir Roots of an Empire
General Sir Charles William Pasley (1780 – 1861) was a distinguished British soldier and military engineer. He had a brilliant mind and his writings are generally considered to have influenced the development of the British Empire. He was fundamental in setting up the Royal Engineers regiment. He was born in Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire on 8th […]
Clackmannan to the Borders
Today we tend to think of mainly rural areas like the Scottish Borders as areas that have suffered from depopulation as people have moved out to find suitable employment. It’s not somewhere that you’d choose to find lots of skilled jobs and good prospects. However, one hundred and fifty years ago, things were very different. […]
Ancestors on the Buccleuch Estates ?
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the largest single landowner in Dumfriesshire and the Scottish Borders was (and still is) the Duke of Buccleuch. Many ordinary people made their living on the Buccleuch estates – perhaps directly employed to serve in the castles and gardens, to provide labour for estate improvements , or to farm […]
More online resources
2020 has been a tough year for everyone and that includes those researching their family history. At last we have the hope of vaccinating the whole population within the next year so perhaps better times lie ahead. For many though, archives and family history centres have been closed for months and all those plans we […]
New indexed genealogy resources for Canonbie now available at relativelyscottish.com
Last time I talked about the value of Kirk Session records and how they can help to fill the gaps in the information provided by more conventional resources that we know like Old Parish Registers and Monumental Inscriptions. One of the drawbacks of the Kirk Session records is that they require computer access to the […]
Kirk Session Records can smash through your family history brick wall
All too often, searching in the Old Parish Registers (OPRs) fails to produce the proof that we’re looking for in terms of a birth or a marriage in the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Now it could be that the ancestors concerned had seceded from the Established Church of Scotland and their records therefore […]
The Sturgeons of Dumfries and Galloway
Did you know that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s ancestors were Ulster Scots? Scots who had moved to Ulster and may have been there for as long as two hundred years before coming back to settle on Ayrshire soil around 1847. Robert Sturgeon was the son of weaver William Sturgeon and his wife Mary Stevenson who […]