Searching for Scottish 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 the 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, not fortunately for them on the Titanic; about great grandmother Nellie Leask who left Orkney for Leith after being badly kicked by the farm cow.

And the photographs? Just bits and pieces, and no classic 19th century prints, no studio portraits of Edwardian families, and sadly no crofting scenes from Orkney either. But the bits and pieces were not without interest, and most of them were 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? - must be my grandparents on the Ramsay side; but the piece de resistance had to be the picture of the 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 its from these first building blocks - the family memories, the oldest photographs - that you can begin to form mental pictures or images of what the lives of your ancestors were really like. Of course there was much work still to be done in researching and sourcing the hard 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 been entertained with some Irish, English, Canadian and German genes. To illustrate their life and times I sourced dozens of historical photographs of people and places, and 19th century maps to pinpoint their ancestral homes.

So today I run Scot Roots, a firm which can offer anyone with a Scottish ancestor or two an ancestor search service at very competitive rates. We try to dig deeper than names and dates. We help source relevant historical prints and maps.