A Personal View

As anyone who has undertaken such a task will know, there is never an end to it. There are fascinating insights to be discovered which lead one on. Even when records are scarce, the researcher casts around for other ways to progress.

There are two ways to approach the subject, depending on inclination:

the object may be to discover living relatives, either at home or abroad, with the aim of making contact or simply to trace long-lost contemporaries; or

there may be an interest in history, and how ancestors lived in earlier times.

In the first case there are probably enough statutory records around relating to the last few generations to keep one busy for as long as one wants, spreading the net ever wider.

In the second case one can probably go directly back in time quite quickly at first, then find that the task becomes difficult as reliance is placed on entries in old parish books, census reports and more obscure sources such as Wills or Poor Law records. There is a wealth of archived secondary sources available.

In my own case, I elected to trace my Scottish forebears as far back as I could, and have found great satisfaction not only in discovering who they were and a good deal about where and how they lived, but how they came to be there. I have also visited areas where they were, and, as it were, steeped myself in the surroundings that they must have known many years ago - and had their joys and tragedies there.

One occasion stands out in my mind. Searching records in the Scottish Archives Office in Edinburgh, I found the annual reports of the pupils in a small school in the tiny hamlet of Finart, near Loch Rannoch in Perthshire. In the year 1777 there was my great-great-great-grandmother, 'Grisy' (Grisell) Kennedy aged seven, able to recite her catechism and write a little. I can see her now, as I write, a little urchin holding on to the hand of her sister Anne, who was two years older, on their way over the heather to school. That is what, to me, makes the task a joy.