Instant Cousins

Instant Cousins : archiving my ancestry

  • Visiting Aunt Susie

    In the late 1970’s, before I met my wife, she was living in a flat in the West End of Glasgow. Not far from where she lived, in Dudley Drive, lived her Aunt Susie. The road that she lived in is made up of a row of Glasgow tenements, four stories high, and very typical…

  • Mr and Mrs Welsh Come to Saltcoats

    Saltcoats is a coastal town in Ayrshire. It is part of what is known as the Three Towns: Stevenston, Saltcoats and Ardrossan. The history of this coastline is built upon coal, iron, shipbuilding, dynamite, and trains. It was possibly one of the busiest industrial hubs of Scotland at the turn of the 19th Century with…

  • Homework

    Homework A surprise request to offer assistance to my grandson with his school project on Remembrance and the stories of great grandparents, or in his case, great great grandparents, led me to revisit the piece that I have written previously, about John McKie M.N. John served in the Merchant Navy throughout the Second World War…

  • Rachel

    This is the start of my research journey into the family history of my wife’s maternal grandmother, Rachel Welsh, who married Andrew Nicol in 1918. Rachel was known to my wife because for a short while Rachel lived in her daughter’s house in Gloucester until she died in the 1960’s. Her connection is not just…

  • Searching for Elspeth

    I have been trying to put together a piece about a member of the Nicol family who has left only a very small footprint in the records available both on Ancestry and Scotland’s People. Although the British Newspaper Archive has given me some hope of finding more. You will recall from earlier posts that the…

  • Newspapers

    I have taken out a subscription to The British Newspaper Archive at a cost of £99 for the year. This gives me access to every newspaper that the Archive has digitalised, which is quite a considerable number of newspapers and magazines. It has a powerful search engine which, if you input the correct information, such…

  • Remembering London Grandma

    It was to differentiate her from my paternal grandmother, that was why she was called London Grandma. The other one was Country Grandma. One lived in London, obviously, and the other lived in the countryside. Well, Limpsfield in Surrey when I was a child was definitely in the countryside. I have no idea what it…

  • A London Field Trip

    Last week I was in London for a sports and culture break. I had been recommended to stay in the Farringdon area of London, EC1 because of its historical links and interesting streets. Never one to miss an opportunity, I realised that it was next to Clerkenwell which is where one of my ancestors lived…

  • The Legendary Bennisters

    In January 2024 I wrote an annual review to this blog to take stock about my activities. I wrote about how researching, using popular research archives, can throw up surprising and exciting avenues which, although connected in some way to the families that I write about, are not directly family members. I mentioned that I…

  • Tracing the Carvers

    Part 3 For the past two weeks I have been tracing my grandfather’s origins and the lives of his brother and sister, two relatives who I never met and who I knew nothing of until I started researching their records. This week I look at Evelyn Daisy Carver, my grandfather’s only sister and my great…


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