When I started to look into my family tree I was explaining the intricacies to a friend and she said ‘what a colourful past you all have’. Now I took this to be a positive thing as it meant that now I had a story to tell. So delving a little deeper, I found out so much and it all shapes the family I have today. I will start to post some of the little stories that I’ve collected over time for you to read, at any point, please drop me a line and let me know if you like the story if you think it is something that you might like to read more of, cause today I’ve decided at long last, I’m going to start to write it all down in a journal for my two little boys so in time to come they have the full details of the family tree.

So here is how the story will start, I have used initials rather than names so that I don’t offend anyone, and the story is very much from my perspective, so siblings if you are reading this and things are not as you recall them, remember that I am recounting my take on this and a lot of this is based on childhood conversations (and that was a few years ago now!!) but feel free to add things for my children’s journal so that we can make sure it is correct and includes as many bits of the jigsaw as possible.

My Family Tree – Where do I fit in?

My friend once said to me what a colourful past you have, so I decided to unfold some more of the story for her. You see to explain where I fit in, I have to got some 15 years prior to my birth to start to piece together my existence. My father was married to a woman and they lived in Greenock on the West Coast of Scotland and they have two kids. My father worked down south and at the time he was working in Grimsby, he met my Mom in a local chemist shop – The weird thing is that now I have actually been there to where they met as my work takes me to Grimsby and it’s funny, how things come about, I don’t think I would ever have known that it was there that they met had I not been going there on business myself and mentioning it to my Mom.

They were together for ten years, but I believe my Dad still went home to Greenock to his family on a regular basis. I was born about seven years into this relationship, but at this time we lived in Edinburgh. We then moved down to Sheffield where my little brother J was born. During this time, my father’s wife was extremely ill and eventually died. So my half brother & sister D & V came to live with us in Edinburgh. It must have been so hard, as not only had they just lost their mum they were coming to live in a new place and all of a sudden they had a wee brother & sister that they knew nothing about!

We lived in a caravan in Loanhead while our house was being built, I don’t recall this but D tells the story extremely well, I will ask him to write a bit for the journal to fill in my blanks.

We lived in the house for around a year before Mom left with J & I. I’m not sure of the timing, but, Mom says it was a month, but it may have been longer, my Dad had found a new woman, S. She already had two young kids A & P so they came to stay in the house in Colinton and we lived in a shared house in East Craigs. We used to go back at weekends to all be together, I will scan in some pictures here of us all. We all seemed so happy when you look at the pictures, but there was a lot of bitterness as I’m sure there is with any broken family.

So I have 5 siblings and I class my step brother and sister P & A in this too.  I will get my tree online so that I can link to it and you can see how it all fits together.

This is the first entry to my journal about my family tree, did you find it interesting?