Who do you think you are? Scottish? Maybe you've got Irish relatives, or ties with the English counties. Perhaps you're even related to royalty, or a famous inventor.
Whichever direction your family tree grows in, experts at the first International Genealogy Festival at Strathclyde University will be able to point you in the right direction.
The four-day event, which starts tomorrow, will be led by genealogy expert Dr Bruce Durie and will include "ask the expert" sessions, as well as lectures on Scots abroad.
The festival, based at the James Weir Building and the Royal College Assembly Hall, is being billed as the Homecoming event for everyone with an interest in searching their family tree.
"We're really pleased to be part of the Scottish Government's Homecoming celebrations," said Dr Durie. "It's an ideal place to come if you've already started looking, or you're just about to start looking at your family tree. On some days we'll focus on foreigners researching their Scottish roots and on others it'll be more for people living in Scotland."
The festival will include lectures on Scots in New Zealand, and India, and the influence of Scots on Canadian history. Dr Durie and his team will also do a live search of musician Dougie MacLean's family tree.
"There has been a large increase in people searching for their family tree since we opened the Scotland's People website in 2002," said Duncan Macniven, the Registrar General for Scotland.
Resources from the website will be available at the festival. "We're in a unique position in Scotland as we have very good records and we're also ahead of the pack in terms of digitising them all so people can see them online. It's now much easier to find out where you come from than it was in the past."
To find out how easy it is, I asked Dr Durie to help me look into my own family tree. Although I knew some of my family history, the origin of the name McMeekin was a bit of a mystery. I was also intrigued to find out why my family had such an unusual spelling of McMeekin - similar-sounding names are commonly written McMeechan, McMeechin and McMeeckin.
Fortunately Dr Durie assured me that a lack of knowledge is not a hindrance to tracing your family tree. Indeed, all you need to start are the names and dates of births, marriages and deaths of your grandparents.
I started with my paternal grandmother and father and used Dr Durie's archive to find out more. My grandmother, also Elizabeth, was a Findlay before she got married, so we searched for her father, Robert, and his parents. Dr Durie used old marriage records and it proved to be incredibly efficient - within 15 minutes I knew that my great-grandfather was called Robert Findlay and that his father shared the same name. It also transpired that my great-great-grandmother's maiden name was Abrines and that her father, Samuel Abrines, was born in Ireland.
"That's not an Irish name though," said Dr Durie. "It's more likely to be Spanish in origin." After searching some ship passenger lists, Dr Durie revealed that a number of people called Abrines came into the UK and Ireland in the early 1800s from Spain, Gibraltar and Mexico. However, without further research it's impossible to tell which part of the world my own ancestors came from.
The McMeekin name proved easier to track down. My dad's ancestors were all based in Maryhill and Dr Durie can trace my family there until the early 1800s, when my great-great-grandfather John McMeekin married Jane Crawford. However, before his marriage there is little about our family in the archive, which leads Dr Durie to suspect John may have originally come from Ireland.
So am I Irish-Spanish then? "Not quite," said Dr Durie. "The McMeekin name, in all its different spellings is definitely Scottish. It was first used in Galloway in some form in 1156. Some people think a different spelling means different roots, but the truth is the names have just got written down differently in the distant past and got stuck that way." Visit www.strath.ac.uk/homecomingscotland for more information on the festival.
Discover your heritage 1. Find out the names, dates of births, marriages and deaths of your grandparents, including correct spellings.
2. Use marriage records from online sources at websites such as www.scotlandspeople.
gov.uk or www.familysearch.
org to trace back your great grand parents initially.
3. Write down your family connections as you go because you will often be charged to view official documents.
4. If you cannot find out information online, consider visiting the last-known location your family lived at to search local records.
5. For families that come from outside Scotland, search on ship passenger lists to find migrant names.
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