The Colonisation of Jeanie

 I have always grown up with stories.

There's the ones that Mum and Dad and grandparents and neighbours and classmates and siblings would tell.

And there's the ones that school and radio and books and the telly would give.

Of late I have invested time and money - and a small amount of saliva - into teasing the truth from family  narrative and weaving it with the weft of history.

However history has a way of moving around when you put it under the microscope.

When first I got my results it advised a good dose of Scotland with the rest a brew of basic white girl - the family lore was "English, Scottish, Irish, French, German and whoever else decided to invade ".

But my grandmother always said that her family came from "outside Glasgow".

It was discovered many years later that her family name was on an American college building during a tour my aunt made. She discovered the contribution for the building came from a wealthy local family who had several generations before come from Londonderry. Technically yes, outside Glasgow.

And this many years later, I learned that many Scottish families traversed the sea for generations, following the harvest and being bodies for hire between the geographic boundaries of Scotland and Ireland.

And I learned that my grandmother's mother - a mythical creature even for my grandmother - had a mother born to a Lanarkshire stonemason come publican in Newcastle and an Aberdeenshire lass who had eight children and at least five lived to adulthood.

And my grandmother's grandfather was six years old when he and five siblings and parents travelled from Old Monkland, Lanarkshire   to the brand new world of South Australia, which was apparently in greater need of coal miners than their homeland (and cheaper to send than try to keep alive during famines caused by weather, crop failure and being at the behest of an uncaring class structure - far more common than sanitised history books had me assume).

(LATE EDIT - I had put "possibly on the same ship as two uncles and their TEN children but no wives or mothers" but worked out it was a census when my great-great-grandmother was 18 - her father and uncle had these 10 including her aged down to 4 with no mother and she was the oldest.)

And then I discovered that another forbear may have come indirectly via Ireland during the plantations experiences of the 18th and 19th centuries and have done a deep dive into podcasts about that on a few long drives of late.

Hooboy. 

No convicts. No royalty. Just a lot of callouses in this tree.

And then - Ancestry have had a good hard look at the data collected vs the data assessed and the imaginary lines that used to often move as fealties and armies waxed and waned and have "upgraded" and my brew of basic white girl is now more English than Scot. 

(And Danish, Dutch and Icelandic touches rather than the previous tones of Norway and Wales)

Still callouses. Still white. 

Bloody colonisation happening even to my DNA.

Still. Outside Glasgow!