THOUGHTS ON

Amidst the tumultuous nature of 2020, Diane Linsday has managed to enjoy a rather good year of genealogy – in fact maybe even her best year yet!

Despite it all, Diane Lindsay thinks she might have had her best year yet, genealogy-wise...

It’s been a funny old year. Dour and dreich* in many ways, but genealogically speaking, it’s probably been my best year yet, with brick walls tumbling, missing links discovered and dainty little finishing touches of the kind that bring joy to all family historians added to our joint Lindsay/veasey family tree.

I’ve discovered a new 2x greatgranddad and a lost 2x great-grandma and a photograph of my husband’s great aunt Lizzie Mckinstry. She emigrated from Kilwinning in Ayreshire to Pennsylvania in 1903, and it neatly confirms a family tale that when my mum-in-law was a little girl in Scotland, during WW1, parcels arrived regularly from relatives in America, although she couldn’t remember who they were.

And that’s not all. Instead of slouching away like some rough beast* on its way to 2021, for me this year has danced off doing a jig in a kilt and sporran to the tune of ‘Scotland the Brave’, making way for jolly January and the joyful news (according to Ancestry DNA) that I am 28% Scottish! After many years of nothing but English ancestry I can now legitimately justify my passion for Scottish folk music. I even love the odd seasonal burst of Andy Stewart and Jimmy Shand; please don’t say ‘Who?’ Look them up on December 31st if you’re young enough to barely remember the 80s. I challenge you to keep your feet still!

This has been regarded as something of a peculiarity by the vast majority of my ‘Ey up me duck’ (Warwickshire) and ‘Art tha goin on, reet?’ (Yorkshire) families, as has my romantic attachment to all things Scottish. I am honest enough to admit much of the magic is probably Scotch Mist, all down to Sir Walter Scott, a teenage crush on Bonnie Prince Charlie and possibly Braveheart. However, I dearly loved my Scottish in-laws, who really did say ‘Och Aye the noo!’ and gave me a silver Lindsay clan badge and a good Scottish surname when I wed their son, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising.

But back to DNA, and before anyone writes in to say I’ve misunderstood the science, please take this exuberance as a slightly flippant but deeply pleasing interpretation of my results. Going on the fact that 28% is a just over a quarter of my suggested genetic make-up, the rest being middle English and northern British, with a whisper down South… I suspect great-granny Emma Edwick’s the culprit or I should say, the benefactor. Born in St Osyth,

Essex, she lived out much of her life in Skipton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Let me explain:

Emma, née Edwick, then Norton, then Jones, had eleven children. After the first five, Mr Norton died and she had a liaison which produced my grandma Lily, surnamed Norton but with no father named on her birth certificate, and an impossibility anyway because Mr Norton had been dead for two years. She then gave her next child the surname Jones before marrying him and having four more offspring with her jolly Welsh postman, who my mum thought was her granddad, remembered as ‘always sitting smiling in the chimney piece’. John Jones named himself stepfather as a witness on Lily’s wedding certificate so unless they were all trying to look uber-respectable, that rather clinches the fact that he isn’t my real ancestor.

Grandma Lily, who died when mum was three is now the only direct forebear with an ever-widening paternal blank on my tree. I’ll probably never know her father’s name, but I like to think Emma’s mystery man and Lily’s birth-father could be the source of my welcome drop of Scottishness. And probably the source of my Caledonophilia, the symptoms of which unlikely sounding condition obviously caused me to gleefully marry a Scotsman.

I am joking, but part of me really hopes it’s true. Even if it isn’t, Hadrian’s Wall is only a stone’s throw from Skipton and I’ll bet some of my ancestors would have climbed that wall. Caledonia is after all North Britain.

Happy New Year, or Bliadhna Mhath Ùr – (Bleea-nah Va Oor) as we wannabe Scots say!

*gloomy

I like to think Emma’s mystery man and Lily’s birth-father could be the source of my welcome drop of Scottishness

About the author Diane Lindsay has been addicted to family and local history for more years than she cares to admit, still teaches it to anyone who will listen, and often slips it cheekily into her creative writing class. She has enough brick walls to keep her going for many years and plans to live long enough to knock down every one. She finds it very hard to take herself too seriously.