Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 32 on 13/04/2007.

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Family ties

VisitScotland, the Scottish government agency which promotes Scotland as a tourist destination throughout the world has, in recent years, launched a series of genealogy initiatives aimed at expatriate Scots, in particular its website: ancestralscotland.com.

This year, of course, has been billed as Highland 2007, and the year 2009 designated as The Year of the Homecoming. Both celebrations are targeted at the estimated 28 million descendants of emigrant Scots in a bid to encourage them to make a trip back to the land of their ancestors. And part of that voyage of discovery, of course, involves their finding out where those ancestors lived and who and what they were.

In this regard, I have to say that I am extremely fortunate thanks to my father who, in his retirement years, did an extensive amount of research into my own family background, tracing our East Lothian roots as far back to 1600. In a way, this was straightforward since East Lothian has always been a prosperous agricultural area where local families tended to marry their neighbours and their deaths are recorded on the tombstones of a series of village cemeteries. The problem arises when you try to reach further back into the middle ages and find, for example, that the county town of Haddington, listed in the 15th century as the fourth largest town in Scotland, was repeatedly battered, burned and destroyed by wave after wave of English invaders.

It began in 1216, when England’s King John pillaged the town. Some ye.....

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By Roddy Martine

Section : Roddy Martine's World

Page number : 7