Sunday, August 12, 2012

Virtual Sunday in Aberdeen, Scotland

 St. Machar's Cathedral in Aberdeen, Scotland [Mike Christie grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.] from Wikipedia page on Aberdeen. Thanks, Mike.

Sunday Wanderings at St. Machar Cathedral

I've been virtually exploring the area in which my Highland Scot ancestors lived for quite some weeks now. I especially was amazed to find that Aberdeen is also called the Granite City. [I guess I wasn't wrong when I said that I have Granite-In-My-Blood].

For many, many years, I only knew about my Lowland Scots who lived in Dalbeattie but with some research and a lot of help from others, I have set that work aside to work on my grandmother, Annie Aiken's ancestors.

Organizing my records to explore Scotland's People has been challenging. Fortunately, I never throw out any lead until I have either proved or dismissed it. I had information from an old RootsWeb page by Roy Flett, that said that there was a gravestone in this cemetery pictured here that was of William Beveridge. I kept looking at that printout until last month when I thought I'd better learn more about the churchyard before I tried to find out if this gravestone ever really existed.

With help from others, I learned that the place called Woodside is a village or a burgh in the county of Aberdeen. Sometimes, this is written as Aberdeenshire. It is in the North East corner of Scotland. There is a family history society there called the Aberdeen & North-East Scotland Family History Society. Check out the map of the burial grounds they have.

It is here that I began to see if I could prove that William and Ann's gravestone had information on it to help me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Many of the granite buildings in Aberdeen actually sparkle in the sunlight (when the sun occasionally shines) and the headstones last forever, compared to our Lowland sandstone headstones which crumble. Good luck with William and Ann :-)