What This Is All About
Important note - The historic buildings site Canmore, which I have linked to in several places, has changed and I will, over time, revise my links. In the meantime if you get a link to Canmore with no information, use the search box at the top of the Canmore page to try to find the information, which usually consists of a map and some photos.
This is the family history of Allan Old, the one born in 1954, and it's written in a narrative form because tables of names, dates and places are all a bit dry. 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 as there are areas relating to my in-laws. Correspondingly, 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 it 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 much more interesting and it's all documented here in story form. Look at the Teasers menu for a list of similar items.
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 families 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. I've also tried to add some cultural history to the stories so you can relate the lives you're reading about to the world that they knew. We don't always have photographs of the people in our tree but if we see images of contemporaries we can imagine the rest to make the stories more vivid. I wouldn't have undertaken this project if it wasn't for my interest in the social history of Scotland. In this family history you will find the Highland Clearances, the Irish immigrants, shipbuilding on the Clyde, herring fisheries, Victorian train drivers, soldiers, crofters and weavers, all part of the making of the Scotland we know. You will also find the dark secrets we weren't really supposed to know about. There are illegitimacies galore but we also have a jailbird and a lunatic (official term used in the census).
Now, to help you make sense of the site and what's in it, read this first.