What has family history ever done for any of us ………..?

 Now I ask that question not to offend anyone and certainly not to rubbish countless people including friends as well as my own sisters who have given up endless hours trawling the internet, reviewing dusty archives and standing in quiet churchyards confronting the graves of long dead ancestors.

Unknown and undated family member

And as someone who has done my share of all those things I understand the fascination to know who we are by knowing something of those in our family who went before us.

The journey often throws up tragedies, a fair few mysteries and some lost relatives.

During my research, I not only solved one dark secret, but uncovered a few more yet to be solved and discovered a new and exciting area of historical research. *

But all of which should come with a health warning, like the time on a warm sunny Saturday morning when I received one of those familiar family birth, marriage and death certificates which tell you so much about your chosen relative.

In this case that sunny Saturday became a whole less bright and sunny when the death certificate revealed that a brother of my great grandma Eliz had committed suicide with a cutthroat razor. The shock mingled with an overriding sense of voyeurism that I was somehow intruding on a family tragedy stopped me in my tracks.  This was not some light breeze into the corners of a relative’s life  but something very sad and dark.

And it raised the question of why do it, why burrow deep into  the lives of people just because they were once family and because I could courtesy of the internet?

Uncovering their stories, undated

More so because some will have spent a lifetime burying those secrets away from the gaze of loved ones, family and friends.

I always did and still do justify it by trying to place them in the context of where and when they lived and by so doing try to understand how they fitted into the bigger picture.

In the past that had led me to stop digging around the 1830s.  This was not an arbitrary decision but based on the official registration of births deaths and marriages in 1837 and the first fully accessible census return of 1841 which offers up details of when and where people were born and later lived, along with their occupations, and family members.

It was a decision which made sense, because they were easily found by searching genealogical platforms and it fitted with my own interest in the Industrial Revolution.

And so, I had rather answered that question of what had family history ever done for any of us, because it allowed me to better understand the great sweep of history by seeing how my family made all of work.

"............ I have thrown away the scabbard"

Not for me that fruitless and questionable quest to discover if one of mine had fought at the Battle of Hastings and by degree had been rewarded by stolen English land or punished for not stopping that arrow that may have wounded Harold.

But now I have joined the quest because having known we originated in the east Highlands and were a member of a clan I have begun to wonder if we were mixed up in that disaster that was the battle of Culloden.  It was indeed a disaster for many of the Highlanders who followed the fop who aspired to win back the throne for the Stuart’s. The defeat led the Young Pretender to scuttle back to Rome leaving those who had followed his vain glorious and misjudged gamble to be harshly punished by the authorities.

The Highland charge at Culloden, 1746

The journey is new to me.

 I had  grown up with the stories from my uncles, two of whom fought with the Black Watch and listened to the Jacobite laments but the realities of the defeat had turned me against all things Culloden.

The Royalist armt stanfd firm, Culloden, 1746

Until having done the ancestral DNA test which confirmed where we came from and rediscovering old family trees that took us back to a John Simpson born in the Highlands in 1780 I just wonder.  He was born just thirty-five years after the battle, and so will have grown up with family members who might well have talked in hushed tones about the defeat and may even have known that his father participated.

It is a tad romantic especially given the daft nature of the Stuart attempt and the subsequent vengeance which settled on the Highlands and I guess is all most impossible to fulfil, but I wonder if we could get close to uncovering our part in the events of 1745-6.

Well we shall see, and despite the heaps of rabbit warrens I might vanish down I think it would be fun and end up with me deciding family history can do a lot for us.

Uncle George in the uniform of the Black Watch, 1918

Location; Our family

Pictures;  Unknown and undated family member from the Simpson collection, uncovering their stories,  undated courtesy of Ron Stubley "Gentlemen he cried, drawing his sword, I have thrown away the scabbard", from Scotland's story: a history of Scotland for boys and girls, , and The Battle of Culloden, David Morier, 1746

*British Home Children, the growing historical study of young people migrated from Britain and other parts of the old British Empire by the Poor Law Unions, and children’s charities. One of these was a great uncle of mine.