How far back can you trace your family ancestry?

You all know that both Dad & I have both spent much time digging and delving into our respective family histories, and in some instances have things that previous generations may well have preferred that we did not know. My background searches have taken me back in time to my Walker and Robertson histories on Mum’s side and to my Currie and Cunningham ancestors on Dad’s side. I have only gone as far as I feel I reasonably want to do and that has been largely limited by my Scottish heritage.

All the Births, Deaths and Marriages, and copies of all the Parish records for Scotland are held at the Registry Office in Edinburgh and are accessible by search and then by payment of a fee to see each actual record. Englands’ records are more available in some repects in that increasingly they are held by all sorts of links to the ‘Ancestry.com’ site, available by subscription to that site. Census records are generally available. Statutory recording of Births, Deaths and Marriages only became compulsory in Scotland in 1856, while Census records are available back to 1841.

Some of the earlier ones are very rudimentary, and their accuracy cannot always be counted on. Information from individual Parish Records can be scanty at best and non existant at worst when records may have been subject to fire, water damage, age and rodents! All that said, I have pulled together a lot of information and, to me, a fascinating social history of my family over the, in some cases at least 250 years. The Walker family, my grandfather’s family, were Slaters in Alyth as far back as an Alexander Walker - whose eldest son in his marriage with a Grissel Ogilvy, David Walker, was born in Alyth in 1784.

I haven’t at this time been reliably able to date anything further back than that. Much of our direct line in Walker history falls into place after that. The Robertsons of my maternal granny are first found in Kirriemuir where James Robertson, a shoemaker, & Margaret Fimister were married in 1846. On my Dad’s side I can take Currie’s back to the marriage of James Currie, a school master and subsequently a Minister of the Church of Scotland, to Mary Currie, in Ayrshire in 1808.

Because of a unusual endowment, we can trace maternal ancestors of the Curries back through McInnes’s, Cassils and Blairs, to a philanthropic merchant, James Blair who made a Mortification to Hutcheson’s Hospital in Glasgow in 1710. The Cunninghams of my Granny Currie’s family appear to have come from Ireland in the late 1840’s and lived in Renton in the Vale of Leven. It ihas been an interesting exercise to see the development - the rise and, in some cases, fall of family fortunes over the years giving perspective to life in our own times.