Future meets past: old Ally Alistair MacLeod was a Highland crofter, descended from Viking chieftains. His tiny granddaughter Moira Hooks was born after her mother (whose sister is shown here) had moved away to Glasgow. Now she and her descendants all live in England. This picture captures the only time they ever met (courtesy of the MacLeod Family Collection).
Old family photographs provide the perfect backdrop to your research, helping bring the past to life.
The very first steps in tracing your Scottish family history are to talk to your relatives and keep a note of what they tell you. This section suggests what to ask, and how to record your growing store of information about your family tree. The next step is to identify archives or organizations, which are introduced in this section. Before diving any deeper into your research, it is helpful to gain a background understanding of Scotland’s geography and naming systems.
CHAPTER 1 How to start your family tree
Ask the family
The first resource for tracing your Scottish family history is your own family. Meet, email or telephone your immediate relatives and ask for their stories and copies of old photographs and papers, especially family bibles, old birth, marriage and death certificates or memorial cards. Even old address books can lead you to relatives worldwide, who will be able to extend your family tree. Disappointingly, old photographs seldom have names written on the back: they may show your ancestors, but they are anonymous. Old ones often show the photographer’s name and address, and some firms’ records are in local archives. Directories (see p. 88-9) can show when the photographer was trading, helping to give the photograph a rough date, and the mere location can be a clue as to which side of your family is being depicted. And, please, write names on the back of your own photos, to save future generations this frustration, or even include a family tree in your own photo albums, to show who’s who.
This photograph of Catherine and Jane Wilson in 1923 is usefully marked on the back ‘Drummond Shields Studio, Edinburgh’, thus suggesting the area where these girls may have grown up (courtesy of Jane’s daughter-in-law, Helen Taylor).
When you interview a relative, use a big piece of paper to sketch out a rough family tree as you talk, to keep track of who is who. Structure your questions by asking the person about themselves, then:
• their siblings (brothers and sisters)
• their parents and their siblings
• their grandparents and their siblings
…and so on. Then, ask about any known descendants of the siblings in each generation. The key questions to ask about each relative are:
• full names
• date and place of birth
• date and place of marriage (if applicable)
• occupation(s)
• place(s) of residence
• religious denomination, whether Church of Scotland, Free Church, Catholic, Jewish, and so on.
• any interesting stories and pictures.
Next, ask for addresses of other relatives, contact them and repeat the process. Once you know the name of a village where your ancestors lived, try tracking down branches of the family who remained there, for people who
Sennachies
Before Christianity and literacy came to Britain, a special class of Druid, the seanachaidh or sennachie, memorized and recited the royal sloinneadh or pedigree. Long after other forms of Druidism had fallen away, sennachies remained, some as villagers who remembered the local family histories, others in the clan chiefs’ households. In about 1695, Martin Martin wrote in A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (Birlin, 2002):
‘Before they engaged the enemy in battle, the chief druid harangued the army to excite their courage. He was placed on an eminence, from whence he addressed himself to all of them standing about him, putting them in mind of what great things were performed by the valour of their ancestors…’
Martin, who used the term ‘marischal’ for the chief’s sennachie, also said he was,
‘obliged to be well versed in the pedigree of all the tribes in the isles, and in the Highlands of Scotland; for it was his province to assign every man at table his seat according to his quality; and this was done without one word speaking, only by drawing a score with a white rod which this marischal had in his hand, before the person who was bid by him to sit down; and this was necessary to prevent disorder and contention; and though the marischal might sometimes be mistaken, the master of the family incurred no censure by such an escape.’
It’s good to know that, occasionally, we genealogists were allowed to get it wrong.
Dr Johnson (1709-84), the London essayist and lexicographer who travelled around Scotland with the writer James Boswell in 1773, had trouble finding whether the bard and sennachie were different people, or one and the same, though he acknowledged different customs may have prevailed in different places: touring the Hebrides, he found that neither had existed there for some centuries. However, we do remain: Lord Lyon is High Sennachie of Scotland, and all genealogists worth their salt have inherited their share of this ancient Druidic mantle.
Aristocrats, such as John Campbell, fourth Duke of Argyll, shown in this painting by Thomas Gainsborough, have always had the help of sennachies or genealogists to record their family history.
have never left may know a lot about the ancestors you have in common, and might have tales about your forbears who migrated away.
What you are told will be a mixture of truth, confused truth and the odd white lie. Write it all down and resolve discrepancies using original sources. Watch out for ‘honorary’ relatives. Whilst writing this, I received an email telling me, ‘I recall as a boy, being introduced to people named to me as Uncle Ned, Auntie Jo, and Cousin Francis. Many years