One of the biggest waves of mass emigration came during the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th Centuries, when tenant farmers were forcibly evicted by landlords looking for bigger income. But throughout the 20th Century Scottish families settled across the globe, and continue to do so today.

Personal touch

While much research about family roots can be done online, on Scottish soil the story can be fleshed out. And in a country where distances are not great, it’s easy to follow the trail to the church one’s grandparents, great-grandparents or earlier generations belonged to, and to the town, village or glen where they lived. “I tell everybody: ‘Your ancestors are waiting on the shelves, you just need to come and find them’,” says Woodcock. “The wealth of information that is available in some of the records is mind boggling.”

Professional researchers call 1855 “the golden year”, says Iain Ferguson, manager of Edinburgh’s ScotlandsPeople Centre where Scottish birth, death, marriage and census records are kept. That’s because in that first year of compulsory registration, far more information was asked for than in subsequent years. Old parish registers date as far back as 1553 but not all have survived intact, says Ferguson. Some were borrowed for legal purposes then not returned and others stored in damp, rat-ridden cellars.

While there’s been a sizeable uptick in visits to the ScotlandsPeople website, 14,500 people visited the search rooms between April 2016 and March 2017. There, staff help with conundrums like surname variants – Ferguson says that even a seemingly straightforward name like his own has about 10 different spellings.

Even in the search rooms there are moments of poignancy. In the Glasgow City archives a woman in Woodcock’s group discovered records of two babies who had died. “They weren’t buried in a paupers’ grave. Their parents paid for a grave. She knew they couldn’t have afforded that and it told her how important those babies were to them. She was tearing up,” says Woodcock.

For Lebby Campbell, the family connection is many generations distant, but the connection to her clan is very much alive. (For many centuries, up to the 1746 Battle of Culloden, Scotland was run by the clan system – clan meaning ‘family’ or ‘children’ in Gaelic). Through the Clan Campbell Society, Lebby has made friends at home in South Carolina, as well as in New York City and further afield. “We call ourselves ‘kinsmen’. I’m part of a big worldwide family,” she says.