What This Is All About
This is the family history of Allan Old, born 1954, written in a narrative form rather than in the form of tables of names, dates and places. The raw data is here if you want it but the stories are more interesting. If you are related to me there will be some areas of interest for you though not all of it will be relevant. Similarly, if you are related to my wife, Sandra Mackay, there is something for you to read and enjoy.
Family History research is booming now that the records have been digitised and are easily searched. I had aready undertaken much of the research of my own family tree by the tradition means of trawling through microfilm records and noting the records by hand. These were added to a commercial database program which provides a structure to the data.
Unfortunately, tables of data are boring and a list of dates and places and names will soon see anyone reading them start to glaze over. It is much more interesting to hear anecdotes which start "Did you know that your great-grandad had children by two sisters?" or "Believe it or not, your grandad had four different names before he was one year old!" or "Did you know that your family went from Edinburgh to Glasgow to Edinburgh to Glasgow before settling in Kinghorn?" or "Your great-great-great-great-great-grandad was one of the very first highlanders to be cleared off the land to be replaced by sheep?" or "In your tree, a brother and sister cross-married a sister and brother". Now these snippets seem more interesting and it's all documented here in narrative form. I moved to Corstorphine in 1992. Little did I know that two branches of my family had started here, Elder Samuel born in 1777 and Agnes Cunningham born in 1700. Different strands of my family lived virtually next door to each other in Leith in the nineteenth century but the strands didn't meet up until the 1950s. Some of my ancestors would have attended the same agricultural fairs as Sandra's up in Caithness in the late 1700s. These are the discoveries which add a bit of colour to the histories.
Some names in my ancestry are just that, names, but where I know more I've laid it out in a more meaningful way. If you are related to me or my wife Sandra there should be something of interest here for you.