Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 7

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