This is Tom Paterson's page with a few of his ancestors to keep him company.........enjoy 

The Fantastic Falkirk Wheel joining
the Forth & Clyde and Union Canals

The Fantastic Falkirk Wheel - joining the Forth & Clyde and Union Canals

The Kelpies with snow on the Ochil Hills


The kelpies

That's me in the middle


That's me in the middle

Callendar House, Falkirk - has a museum and a local research room with thousands of old photos of the folk and area

Callendar House, Falkirk - has a museum and a local research room with thousands of old photos of the folk and area

Eventually I hope this will be a reasonable source for anyone researching the Scottish branch of their Family Tree and interested in the local history of Falkirk and Stirlingshire. It will also include any articles gleaned from newsgroups that I think may be useful background information for the family historian. I made a start by selecting some turn of the century photographs from a series of booklets published by Falkirk District Council that depict the life of the common folk of the Falkirk area. If you have any additional bits of useful info then mail me.

The best place to navigate around my site is from my Contents page. You can get to it by clicking on the button from just about any one of my pages. Alternatively you can start from the the charts for my grandparents -

and the Irish Connection (The Honorable Thomas O'Grady)

There is a full index here of all of the family names that I am interested in with links to charts, family photos and notes on some towns and parishes. This links to family group pages with notes on any connections to other researchers.  Don't bother clicking on a name in the index unless there is a date range and place of origin against it. If you have an interest in the origins and history of the surnames then try here

A major project that I've finished with for the moment is the Statistical Account for Stirlingshire (1840/1), an account by parish of the life of the common and landed folk written by their parish ministers.

Another big project has been the sharing of the 1881 census returns for East Stirlingshire. There are a couple of formats for this with the latest being a searchable database accessed from the same start point as my own family list of names. About 10 years after I shared all this the Scotlands People website shared the 1881 LDS (Latter-Day-Saints) census for the whole of Scotland

I've taken a DNA test which is uploaded to Ancestry, MyHeritage and GEDMatch. This has provided some useful connections amongst the 20,000 matches but still no further forward on my big hurdle - finding the ancestors of the Paterson name - though I have confirmed the Hossack and the O'Grady illegitimate lines through DNA matches.

I currently don't have a guestbook but you can mail me by hitting the email button on foot of this page.


GENEALOGY SOURCES (SCOTLAND)

If you are a newcomer to this genealogy game then you will find these sites give useful information on getting started. The best place ,of course, is with your immediate relatives - the older the better. Nowadays the Scotlands People website has a wonderful collection of records but when i first stared there were very sources on the internet, and all real research could only be carried out by hard graft, digging around in record offices, family history centres and such like. I'm now in the process of widening out my tree and making it available on Ancestry as well as paying, again, for for digital copies of certificates.


GENERAL SCOTTISH SITES


LINKS TO FELLOW GENEALOGISTS


MISCELLANEOUS BACKROUND READINGS(SCOTLAND)



Last Update by Tom Paterson on 22nd Feb 2018