How I Started my Family History

 

In 1982 I was aged eleven and was in Primary 6 at school. My class did a project about Russia, part of which was about the inherited disease hæmophilia in the Russian royal family. Part of this project involved drawing our own family trees. I asked my grandparents about their families, and so found out the names of my great and great-great grandparents, and of my grandparents' siblings. When the project was over and done with, the piece of paper with my family tree on it got packed away in a box in the loft of my parents' house and was forgotten about for more than ten years.

In 1995 my Gran Reid died, and my parents and I were clearing her house. We were keeping an eye out for her birth certificate, to take along when registering her death. One of the first drawers we opened contained a marriage certificate for my great-great grandparents James Walker and Mary McFadyen who were married in 1882. I was intrigued by a small piece of paper sellotaped to the bottom, saying, "married under her step father's name". I found myself wondering who her real father was. There were also a number of other old certificates, about ten in total, including a birth certificate for James Walker who was born in 1864, but no birth certificate for my gran.

When we went upstairs and began to clear out one of the wardrobes we found a musty old cushion cover stuffed full of unlabelled old photographs - photos that my dad didn't even know existed. It felt like discovering buried treasure!

Eventually we had to register gran's death without her birth certificate - which wasn't really a problem, especially as my dad took along all those old certificates that we had found. The registrar was quite intrigued to see them.

On the final day of clearing the house, my mum was going round the house one last time just before leaving, to check that everything was in order. When she went into the bedroom she was strangely drawn to a little cubbyhole beside the bed, which had a layer of linoleum in the bottom of it. She doesn't know why she decided to pull up the corner of the lino, but when she did, there was gran's birth certificate!

A few weeks later we visited my other gran. My interest in my family's history had been awakened by this point, and so I asked her to go through her suitcase of old photos and tell me about them. It's the last happy memory I have of her as she became ill before I saw her again, and died just six weeks after my Gran Reid had died. I inherited the suitcase of old photos, and discovered that since the day we had gone through them together my gran had labelled many more of them.

And so it was a fascination with some old photographs and a piece of paper sellotaped to a marriage certificate that drove me to unearth the piece of paper on which I had drawn my family tree back in primary school, and to continue my research into my family history.