About Me
I am Allan Old the fourteenth. I know this because a gentleman named George Insill had mapped out the family tree of all the Olds in this part of the country. We are all descended from the quaintly-named Honeyman Old and Elder Samuel. I'm not the fourteenth in a straight line but, as will be seen, family names were recycled in Scotland in days gone by and this is a major help in tracing backwards as is explained elsewhere in the site.
This all began for me one day in Stevenson College in Edinburgh when a colleague named Carole Tweedie came up to me and asked if I was Allan Old. After checking how I spelled both parts of my name she told me that her mother was an Old and that we were probably related a few generations back. Her father, the aforementioned George Insill, had painstakingly compiled family trees including the Olds leading back to Honeyman and had established that all Olds in the area were descended from him. After a meeting was arranged with my parents we established where our trees met. Being provided with this wealth of information on my ancestry was inspirational and I started on my own quest.
I decided that I wanted to know about other sides of my family and set out to discover all direct ancestors. I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents and you can see where this is heading. I made rapid headway using the methods detailed here then decided that, as my children have Sandra's ancestry as well, I should additionally research the Mackay line. This makes for a massive project but I have limited the scope by ignoring side branches so cousins and uncles and aunts are only of interest to me (from a genealogy point of view anyway) if they help me find an ancestor by the naming patterns. A researcher has to draw a line somewhere and if you are reading this there's a good chance that you know where you're related to me and can weave your own recent family history into this one.
I have established that I am nearly three-quarters Scottish Lowlander with the rest Irish, some native, some Plantation Scot. If we go further back, which we can't as the records don't exist, then I feel sure that my direct paternal line is Viking. I suspected this from the location and name of my oldest ancestor in that direct line and DNA tests on another male Old relative have supported this, though not conclusively.