Sunday, February 15, 2009

A Polygot Ancestry

I happened across a couple of family history website recently, that have provided useful information about some parts of my ancestry about which I know very little.

The Blair Campbell Family site has some useful information about the Blair and Stevenson families.

These two families are related to the Clearwaters from whom I am descended.

The Forrester & Maitland Family History collates entries from the "Cyclopedia of New Zealand" and lists many Forresters from Invercargill. My father's mother was a Forrester; she died a few weeks after giving birth to her second child, my Aunt Moira. I knew little about her family, so this site filled in a few gaps very nicely.

However, the exercise, useful as it was, prompted some other thoughts. Having updated my database, I prepared a report on my ancestry, to see the 'gaps' filled and the chart extended.

Having done so, the extent of the tree became obvious. So I re-focussed the Report on Charlotte. The resulting Report shows that we can trace our family back some 14 generations, to Rotterdam, Holland. I hope that will be of interest to Charlotte, after her recent visit to Amsterdam and avowed intention to live there.

Because in addition to the number of generations we span, it also shows the diversity of our 'ethnicity' - Irish (green boxes), Scottish (blue boxes), Dutch (orange boxes), and American-Dutch (, oh and a little English thrown there as well.

I was also interested to see just how many branches of the family are Scottish - arguably we are Scottish more than anything else.

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