There are many reasons why you might decide to trace your family tree. Family legends may suggest a connection to someone famous, or to royalty, and you might want to check out the truth behind the rumours. Maybe there’s a suggestion of exotic foreign ancestry, or a link to a dramatic historical event. You may even desire to trace a path back to a notorious criminal! But not many people turn to their ancestral roots out of sheer desperation.
I worked hard at school, believed what the adults said. Get your qualifications and you’ll have no trouble finding a good job, they all said (and still say). And yet, with a basketful of qualifications, right up to degree level, I couldn’t find work. Eventually, and reluctantly, I trained as a teacher. I didn’t feel a vocation for it, but nobody would employ my man either and we didn’t want to raise our kids on benefits.
Once in the job, I found a passion for it. Children and teens are vastly underrated as good company, and it was a thrill to help them discover, and learn how to discover. But then I got ill. Changes at work brought on depression and clinical anxiety, and that led to a diagnosis of autism. My “lifelong career” folded up and vanished, like paper in the flames.
Once I was well again, I tried care work. I wasn’t brave enough to look for anything skilled, but care work is one of the best jobs in the world. You know that everything you do, and how you do it, genuinely has purpose and value. But it involved shifts, and shift work is unpredictable, sometimes ridiculously so. The anxiety returned. I had to quit.
I tried again and again to pick myself up. For fifty applications, I had thirty-eight interviews. I didn’t get a single offer. I applied to work with mental health charities. I was turned down. I did voluntary work, was promised excellent references, applied for work, was turned down. “Don’t tell them you’re autistic until you’re offered the job,” people told me, but your employer only has to offer you appropriate support if they know in advance that you’re autistic, and it’s hardly the best way to start with a new company, announcing that you’ve hidden your needs until you knew you were in the door. Besides, my track record at interviews was already lousy before I was diagnosed. So, in despair, I turned to my ancestors. Maybe there were traditions I could follow. Maybe there were jobs common across the board, which I could turn my hand to. And heaven knows, I had plenty of time for research!
I’ve traced back seven generations now, and what I’ve learned has surprised and reassured me. Teaching had brought us to north Aberdeenshire, where I wasn’t aware of any connections, but I felt at home here within a fortnight after we’d moved in – in fact, more than at home. All my life, wherever I was, I felt a strange urge to be somewhere else, and once we were here, it left me. Here I’m centred, like a homing pigeon come to roost. And I hadn’t traced very far back before I found the place was littered with my forebears. All up the east coast from Aberdeen to Peterhead, they chased the fish and mended their nets (and the Collieston ones almost certainly did some smuggling!). They farmed the land, both as farmers and labourers, from Slains to Turriff. They made shoes in Stuartfield, took prizes for cattle at the New Deer show, lived peaceable lives and stayed out of trouble. They were honest, practical, dependable people, ancestors to be proud of, amongst whom I could easily recognise myself. And best of all, there was Jessie.
Janet ‘Jessie’ Shivas was my great-great-grandmother. She was the third of seven, born to a souter. It won’t have been an easy beginning. Shoemaking was tough work and not well paid, and they were sturdy children, staying alive and needing fed. Jessie’s mother died before she was fifteen, and her father married again. I suspect it wasn’t a happy change for his children, for by the next census all seven had left him.
Like most girls in the area, Jessie became a farm servant. She was only sixteen when she married another farm worker in the Cruden Bay area. Then she seems to have found herself. She took over as the tollgate keeper at Cruden, and in the tiny tollhouse raised eleven healthy children, as well as nursing an uncle until his death and housing her younger brother James. Her husband Alexander found work as a quarry labourer, but she soon had him out of the quarry and running his own carting business. They prospered, moving eventually to a home on Main Street. Meanwhile she’d also taken in a grandson, and later, Alexander’s widowed sister. It must have been a camsteerie home, right enough!
Alexander lived until 1916. Fired by Jessie’s practicality, determination and generosity, I sought everywhere for her burial record but without success. And then I found something quite different.
In August 1920, four years widowed and aged seventy-four, Jessie hopped on a boat for New Zealand. She went to join some of her children who had already emigrated, and I understand she lived happily in the Auckland area for another ten years and is buried there. I’d have loved to visit her grave, but that’s not going to happen on Carer’s Allowance! But I think of her almost daily. I sit here on her home ground, with her blood pumping in my veins, and I know I need never be daunted. Like Jessie, if I keep up my courage, I’ll find my way.