Geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that almost all Europeans descend from the same ancestors who lived in the 9th century. Their DNA-based research found that anyone living in Europe then who left descendants is an ancestor to most Europeans today. If, like me, you were born in Scotland and most of your ancestors came from Scotland, there’s a chance that Kenneth I MacAlpin, King of Scotland, may be a distant ancestor.
I remember my mother wearing a maroon corduroy dressing gown with a splodge of dried white paint. She said it happened when she brushed against a painting ladder in the hospital while pregnant with me. Most of us have two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on, doubling each generation. Going back ten generations, I have 1,024 grandparents. That is a lot of chance encounters. My ancestors avoided war, accidents, disease, and disasters. Being born depends on hundreds of lucky events. If any of those ancestors had faced different circumstances, I might not be here.
I could think about the many chances and choices that had to align for me to be born in the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh.
Except for a short time in Livingston, I have spent my entire life in Edinburgh. My research shows my maternal ancestors were mainly from the same region, with most coming from Edinburgh, Fife and the Lothians. The earliest record I have found is of my 7th great-grandmother, born in 1684 in Edinburgh’s Canongate, an area that appears often in my research.
Researching my Dad’s side has been more challenging, as several paternal ancestors had multiple marriages and many step-siblings, leading to conflicting information and some false lines of research. So far, I have found that most of my Dad’s relations came from the south of England around Hampshire, with one branch from London’s East End, among terrible poverty and disease.
