What is the longest project you have ever worked on?

I think my ‘magnum opus’, the book we have just published would have to take the prize for this. Jim had worked on the history of his family for many years and had come up with some tantalizing tales and interesting Individuals. I had not given much thought to my family beyond my grandparents or to what I thought was the ordinariness of our history. Sheila’s friend Jenny Gibbons had done a lot of family research and encouraged Sheila to look at our family when they made a trip to Edinburgh and the Register House there.

They found information that took us back a generation or so and Mum was interested but wondered if ’some of these things are best left alone’. Family ’secrets’ are best left undisturbed. After Mum died in 2003 I started to play around with the ’Scotland’s People’ website which logs all of the Statistical and Registry records for Scotland. With our Walker family having been so localized in Perthshire for so many years it wasn’t too difficult to begin to put the pieces of the family puzzle together.

It becomes quite addictive! As the ’tree’ grew I found all sorts of detail which sometimes matched family lore and sometimes didn’t. That said, even where a story wasn’t ’true' there was usually a fragment of the truth, albeit distorted by time or in the telling. I wanted to share the information I found with my siblings and put together a loose leaf spiral bound ‘book’ along with family photos which identified and gave substance, I thought, to the dry dates and information.

As the amount of information grew over the years quite often assumptions that I had made early on were proven incorrect but I felt the stirrings of a ’story’. I could combine real researched family history with what I found fascinating about the social history of the times they lived I and link it together with some of the imagined emotions and events of the people involved. It took at least ten years to accumulate the information, probably more like fifteen.

Each small link was not necessarily acquired sequentially. A small fact uncovered might suddenly connect a whole realm of other facts into a tangible sequence of events. It was like a great big jigsaw puzzle coming together. Once I had decided that I should write the story, there was about two years worth of writing and reworking material until I felt it was in place where I could share and I could bring in help with proof reading and editing - Joanna, Jim & Joel!

From there Joel helped with the ‘publication’ mechanism and now we have ‘Home - A Journey’ printed and on its way. I can’t wait to actually hold the book in my hands Although, this is only about one small snapshot in time, what next??