Instant Cousins : archiving my ancestry
- Cheesemongers and Dairies
- House History
- Other Stories
- Reviews, Reports and Research
- Stone, Steam and Dynamite
- The Welsh Connection
- Wheelwrights, Publicans and a Country Lad
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A Police Constable in Yorkshire
I have been researching the McKie family for some time ever since I started family history research about nine years ago. I have gone back three generations to their life in Kirkinner, Wigtownshire (now Dumfries and Galloway). The tragic loss of John McKie at the age of 33 left his wife Agnes caring for six…
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Anniversary Review
It is a year since I created this blog and I thought I would share some thoughts about its progress. Instant Cousins started as a result of my frustrations about how I could write about by research and how to publish it. A couple of years before the Covid lockdown I had attended a brilliant…
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Herbert Wilcox
This is the story of Herbert and his family and my unknowing connection with his grandson. Herbert was the eldest son of my Great Grandfather John Thomas Wilcox, but not the first born. He was born in in 1874 and baptised on December 13th. That was 149 years ago. The Wilcox family were living in…
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BE (Before Earlspark)
Before Earlspark Avenue there was nothing but arable land. It lay at the bottom of the Parish Road from Millbrae to Langside Village, on the south side of the River Cart. The Parish Road is now Millbrae Hill and of course, there is no longer a Langside Village. That is a completely redeveloped (twice) Battlefield…
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The Nicol Dynasty
A number of things have happened since writing about Peter Nicol and his arrival in Ayrshire. I realised how little my research was on Peter and his family and started exploring in more detail. As a result I have been discovering a number of events and facts that make his life and times a really…
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An Oxted Recap
This week I have been trying out making my own family tree template to create better graphics of the family detail in my postings. It is a work in progress but this is a better way than using tables all the time. In previous posts about the Spilletts I have explained that Henry, my Great…
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Plotting the Site of my House
Where did it all begin? To find out I have arrive at the Glasgow City Archives based in the Mitchell Library. In the pre Covid Lockdown days it was possible to be able to walk in, have a discussion with an Archivist and have documents and other material fetched from the basement and delivered to…
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Peter Nicol 1851-1928
There is something about a name that just seems to draw you to it. Peter Nicol is one of them. It is simple to say, read and look at. It has no middle name, which is slightly unusual for someone born in Scotland in the middle of the 19th Century. It would have been quite…
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The Tredegar Tapes
In 2022 I travelled to Wales to meet a cousin who I had only recently discovered. Being my Great Uncle’s Granddaughter, my cousin Kay is my second cousin. I had never realised that I had an extended branch of my family, growing up and living in South Wales during the 20th Century, until about 2019…
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Uncle Sydney serves his country
The following picture shows my Great Uncle Sydney in the garden of my Aunt Dorothy’s house in Palmers Green. He is standing behind my cousins. I have been trying to work out the year this was taken. I am the same age as one of my cousins and judging by looks I am suggesting that…