Lost cousins

   © Copyright Tatler
I know my Scottish great-grandmother came from the Highlands or islands, because when her son died at 25, she keened, in Gaelic. By then, only people from the Hebrides and Highlands still spoke Gaelic. So, hoping my ancestors had come from the islands I'd fallen in love with (and seeing those islands was love at first sight — that instant, deep recognition), or the one that became my real home, or even that some of my friends were distant cousins, I started doing ancestor research. 

I took DNA tests and found birth and wedding records on Scotland's People. It's quite a feeling, to see the signatures of people you hope are your ancestors: “hope” because there's no way to know for sure that you have the right person.

Before I found anyone, I learned that one great-great-great-great grandfather's surname came the Isle of Yell, in the Shetlands. Partly because of that, partly because I was getting obsessed with it, I stopped searching: I had island blood — just from the wrong coast. But while I was looking for photographs for this blog in a big box of old family photographs, I found a brochure of Oban, the port from which you get to Coll.  I recognized it even before I saw the 

     Imagine the hills green and the water blue.

name — I've walked those streets and stayed in those hotels and taken the boat through that Sound many times. Getting to Coll means an overnight in Oban — more than one, if the swell is so high the big boat can't tie up on the island, or the clouds are so low that the little plane can't make it over the mountains of Mull. 

The Sound of Mull, on the way to Coll

It was a strange feeling to look at those old photographs of Oban, and think my great-something-grandmother and her children had walked there, too.

And I found a photograph of my great-great grandmother with four of her six children (including one of Libby, who married the Scottish painter David Macgregor) sitting in front of this cottage — 

My great-great-grandmother, Jessie Blair, who married Peter Crichton; her son John (she had another named Blair); and 3 of her daughters. Libby married the painter Douglas MacGregor. My great-grandmother Margaret Crichton was already in America.

Sadly, the place wasn't identified, but I bet it's somewhere else in the West of Scotland. Maybe they stopped in Oban on their way to an island, too.

 I know they lived in Edinburgh, I've been to the house; this cottage isn't it. So, probably, they were on holiday — those look like best clothes, too — maybe where they'd come from originally? Jessie's brother lived in Glasgow.  I can hope they came from an island in the Hebrides.

                                             A little bay on Coll. The water is always clean, and often 

                                         this color.

There were 6 children, and only Margaret went to America, so I have cousins all over Scotland; this isn't just wishful thinking, DNA tests say so. But I'm not going to write and say, “Hi! We're third cousins!” 

Or could I? I got an email yesterday from a cousin in England who'd found me with DNA and Ancestry.com, telling me that my great-great grandmother on that side of the family, the English side, Rachael Saunders, had a child “while working on a farm” and had given him, John Saunders, to an aunt to raise. She asked if I knew any more.

Sadly, as I wrote to her, that side of the family — the Rumble side — specializes in secrets. I told her I was glad to have a new cousin and told what I knew: that Rachel married my great-grandfather, presumably without telling him about her other child. Their son, William E. Rumble (portrait to come, I hope) was taught to read by the village minister in Little Wittenham. 

St.Peter's Church Little Wittenham © Copyright Steve Daniels

He must have gone on to a scholarship somewhere, too, because I have his geography book with his name, 1877, and Stoke Rockford, a town with a good school. He saw an ad in the Times of London for  “free farm land” and set sail for America, from Glasgow (so maybe he met Margaret Crichton in Scotland?). The ship's menu, passenger list and his comments on the other passengers were in the box of family things, too.

That ad turned out to be a hoax, and the letter he wrote to the Times about that was published there.

He stayed poor, but his son,  my grandfather, became a lawyer without going to law school — you could do that in those days if you could pass the bar. And it's thanks to his hard work, success,  and my mother's good investments  that I could buy my land and hut on Coll. And it's thanks to the opportunities he had in America, too — which, like many people's in those days, came at the cost of lost families.

(To be continued if I hear back from the English cousin: third cousin, not that distant.)