Finding out who you came from

Births, marriages, deaths, the census, war records, the poor law, the valuation rolls. For Scotland, most of it survives and most of it is searchable. A patient afternoon with the right records will usually find people who were completely unknown to you that morning.

What you normally get for your money, though, is a chart. Names and dates and boxes, correct but cold, and about as much use to your family in fifty years as a tax return.

What I do differently

I write it up as a story. The records go in, properly sourced so anybody can check them, and then the person comes out the other side. Where they lived, what they did, the year that went badly, and the reason that one box in the corner of the photograph has a face nobody in the family can name.

An example, and it is one of mine

My great-uncle was a private in the 6th Battalion of the Black Watch, service number 2758616. He was killed in Italy on 3 July 1944, aged 25, and he is buried at Foiano della Chiana in Tuscany, grave II.H.5. He was the youngest of seven, born at Gateside in Meikleour eighteen days after the Armistice, which is about as unlucky as a start in life gets.

All we had of him when I started was four medals in a drawer, and they were even in the wrong order, and an O.H.M.S. box with his mother's name on it. That box was the only thing left in the world that had been his.

Tracing him properly meant the war graves records, the battalion roll, a newspaper cutting and the medal rolls. What came out of it was not a chart. It was a man who got drafted out of Gibraltar in the last fortnight of the North Africa campaign and went to Italy instead, which is a thing you can actually prove from the medals he was not given.

Kin, the service

A fixed-price written history of one Scottish ancestor, or one family line, delivered as a proper document you can print and hand round. Every fact sourced, so anyone can check it. Written as a story, because that is the part people actually keep.

Taking on work soon. I would rather do a small number of these properly than a pile of them badly, so it opens quietly. If you have a name, a place and roughly a year to start from, that is plenty to go on.

Written in Perthshire, half an hour from the records.