July 7 - Home again

Safely home again after a wonderful trip.

July 5 - Doughnut-shaped pizza?

I'll get to the bizarre pizza in a moment...

We spent our last day in Scotland at the Scotlandspeople Centre in the heart of Edinburgh. I had been there several times before, so all I wanted for myself were the Parnell records from the 1911 census. These showed my grandfather's family that he had left behind when he emigrated to Canada in 1904.

Then Katherine and I tried to be methodical, and located birth/marriage/death records for each ancestor in her Walker line, as far back as we could go. We were able to exclude those records we had already seen in Dumfries where photocopies cost 10p, as opposed to the 50p/image charged by Scotlandspeople, so that helped. The searching in Edinburgh is all digitized as opposed to the microfilm/microfiche in Dumfries - hence the difference in charges I suppose.

We have come away today with 26 images of parish records for events in the lives of Katherine's Walker ancestors, so I'd say that counts as another excellent day. We will have a lot of sorting and assessing to do when we get home, to really understand what we have. Today was really a data collection day.

The day did have both a high point and a low point.

The high point came when we saw the images of the testament and inventory of David Walker after he died in Fourmerkland - it was his house and his grave that we visited on Sunday. We haven't absorbed the details yet, but but the images list and value all his property, down to the plough and the skillets in the kitchen, and it seems to have been necessary to sell everything off following his death to pay outstanding debts. We are wondering if this was the beginning of the end of good times for the Walkers in Holywood, and part of the reason that his grandson Edward emigrated in the 1820's.

And now for the low point. We had decided that Katherine's Andrew Dixon who came to Canada from Dumfriesshire was born in Kirkpatrick-Fleming in 1803, the son of Robert Dixon and Janet Wishart. He was the whole reason for travelling to Gretna on Sunday afternoon. We hadn't zeroed in on this particular Andrew Dixon lightly, but he certainly did seem the best possibility to be Katherine's man.

Well, a little checking today gave us the death record for that Andrew Dixon, in the Gretna area:

So we have been barking up the wrong side of Katherine's tree, sighhh!  That Andrew Dixon loikely never left the Gretna area, or if he did, he didn't go out to New Brunswick. So Katherine loses all the Dixon / Wishart ancestors from the Gretna area that we identified in Dumfries last week and yesterday, and we now are right back to the mystery of "Who is Andrew Dixon from somewhere in Dumfries-shire who married in New Brunswick in 1830?".

Katherine now has some "former ancestors", just like most other family historians, myself included.

After being at Scotlandspeople all day, we were walking back to our hotel when we decided to stop for an early supper on the way. We decided to share a pizza.

Here's what it looked like just after we cut it in half:

Oh, we thought. Isn't that nice - they have added fresh toppings to the centre after cooking it. But then we investigated further:

The fresh toppings conceal a pizza hole!

Fortunately this was plenty for the two of us, and it was really quite tasty despite the surprise.

Tomorrow we go our separate ways, Katherine to visit family in England and me to fly home. We've had a great three weeks on our two-part adventure, with lots of excellent memories to enjoy in the months to come.

Thanks for following along!

July 4 - Dumfries and then back to Edinburgh

We spent this morning back at the Dumfries Archives. We were received there as old friends, and were happy to tell the staff about our great day in Dumfries churches and churchyards. They were delighted that we had been so lucky on our driving day.

Our good luck continued today as we found some information in court records about Katherine's people. We had actually packed up to leave for our drive back to Edinburgh when one of the staff asked if we had looked in the indexes to the local newspapers of the early 1800's. So we quickly unpacked and found references to two of Katherine's ancestors in the early 1800's.

An hour later we really did have to leave, but stopped first for a quick look at the Robbie Burns House which is right across the street from the Archives. We took about three hours to get back to Edinburgh, had great fish & chips at The Royal Mile pub , and are now planning our final research day, at the Scotlandspeople Centre.

July 3 - Visiting Katherine's ancestral places

We have had a really excellent day today, with great success in locating the places where Katherine's people lived and died.

This morning was Walker morning. Here is what we knew before we set out on our drive - much of this learned only in the past couple of days at the Archives and Library here in Dumfries.

Katherine's mother was a Walker. Her great-great grandparents, Edward Walker and Janet Welsh, emigrated from Dumfries-shire in the 1820's and settled in New Brunswick with their young family. Edward and Janet had married in 1813 in Troqueer, Kirkcudbright, just across the river from Dumfries. We started our day at the Troqueer Parish Church.

The minister walked by as we were reading the tombstones, and he said we were welcome to look around inside as the service was still about 45 minutes away.

Katherine talking with the minister

Here is the baptismal font where Edward Walker and Janet Welsh had all their children baptized before they left for Canada:

The font has a silver bowl, a gift from the Norwegian army who were billeted in Troqueer in WWII - we thought this was a strange coincidence since this time last week we were still in Norway.

Edward Walker was the son of David Walker and Helen Milligan who also married in Troqueer, in 1787. But Edward Walker was baptized in Holywood, so that was on our list of places to visit. In fact the Walker family had deep connections with the Holywood area.

Edward's father David Walker was baptized in Holywood in 1753, the son of David Walker and Agnes Thomson. This David Walker also had a sister Grizel Walker baptized in 1770 - she became important today in helping us with our search.

Edward's grandfather, also called David Walker (of course!), was baptized in Holywood in 1728,  the son of William Walker and an as-yet unknown mother.

So... off we went to Holywood, and here is the Holywood church cemetery with a very neat "stile" that we had to clamber over:

And here is the gravestone we found there:

In Memory of

DAVID WALKER who died in

Formarkland May 10th 1775.

Also Grizel Walker his Daughter

who died at Albany place the 12th

Febry 1837 aged 67 years

So...there we were standing at the graveside of Katherine's 4th great-grandfather. We had seen a transcription of this Monumental Inscription at the Library yesterday, but now we were seeing the real thing.

Here is the Holywood Parish Church where so many Walker events occurred:

Next we went to a place called Chapman Thorn which was the hamlet where Edward Walker was born. (Aside to Katherine's family: Katherine took lots more pictures than I did, which you will see when she gets home!)

And then we went looking for Formarkland where David Walker had died in 1775. There is still a farm at Formarkland, and a house which looked very old indeed. Perhaps it wasn't the same house that David died in, but it was the same place - Katherine took a picture of its sign.

Unfortunately no one was at home. I hope they didn't mind us trespassing. Katherine did speak politely to their cows:

We also visited the Dunscore Parish Church where Agnes Thomson was from:

And that was our Walker morning - full of wonderful successes in seeing where Katherine's Walker ancestors lived. And just to summarize, since I know it is hard to follow:

William Walker born about 1700 was the father of

David Walker, born in 1728, married to Agnes Thomson 1753, and died 1775, was the father of

David Walker born 1753, married to Helen Milligan 1787, was the father of

Edward Walker born 1790, married to Janet Welsh 1813, died New Brunswick 1863, was the father of

David Walker born about 1831 in New Brunswick, married to Elizabeth Dixon 1857 in Richibucto, died 1898 in Minneapolis, was the father of

Oswald Smith Walker born 1865 in Richibucto, married to Ellen Kauth 1898 in Minneapolis, died 1923 in Grand Forks, British Columbia, was the father of

Katherine's mother.

Then we had a very boring lunch at a place that had run out of ice cubes for our drinks because it has been so unusually hot for Scotland - well over 20C today - but it fueled us.

This afternoon we switched gears and went to places from the Elizabeth Dixon side of Katherine's family. Let me go backwards in time from Elizabeth:

Elizabeth Dixon was the daughter of

Andrew Dixon who was born in Kirkpatrick-Fleming in 1803, married in Richibucto in 1830, and died in 1876. He was the son of

Robert Dixon of Plumpe Farm, Cumbria, England, and Jannet Wishart of Springfield, Gretna, Scotland who married in Gretna Parish Church in 1798. They married in the actual Church of Scotland in Gretna, and not the Blacksmith's place at Gretna Green where runaways eloped to from England. All these other Dixon places are within about 10 miles of each other and of Gretna Green, so yes we did the tourist thing too.

The Gretna Parish Church where Robert and Jannet married:

The blacksmith's Gretna:

The church at Kirkpatrick-Fleming where Andrew Dixon was baptized:



And then we drove through Springfield (Jannet Wishart) over the border about a mile into England to Plumpe farm (Robert Dixon). Katherine had a great talk with the current owner of Plumpe Farm and has pictures of both it and of Springfield.

By then it was about 7pm and we were zonked. Fortunately despite all this driving we were only about 35 miles from our B&B in Dumfries, so we were home again in next to no time at all.

All in all, a really good day.



July 2 - a day at the Dumfries Library

Katherine and I spent all day at the library tracking down her ancestors. We had some good success narrowing down the places where her Walker, Dixon, Welsh, Wishart, and Wright people lived in and around Dumfries-shire. Katherine bought some ordinance survey maps, and tonight we planned our driving route for visiting her people's places tomorrow.

Staring at the parish records on microfilm has tired us both out, so we will be having an early night.

Pictures from Edinburgh

It's early Saturday morning now at the B&B, with breakfast not available till 8:30, so I have time and good enough connectivity to add some pictures from a couple of days ago.

King Robert the Bruce at the gates of Edinburgh Castle

Tiny and ancient Saint Margaret's Chapel

Altar cloth in Saint Margaret's Chapel

Stained glass window of Saint Margaret

And now for a few more greater-granddads and greater-grandmoms whose pictures are at the Castle:

Margaret's father-in-law, King Duncan I of Scotland

King Malcolm III Canmore and his wife Queen Margaret

Their son, King David I of Scotland who built Saint Margaret's Chapel for his mom.



King William I the Lion of Scotland, the grandson of David I.

 (His father Henry was Earl of Huntingdon, and didn't get a picture since he wasn't a king. The monarchy was not strictly heriditary at that time, and they had great councils after a king's death to vote for the next monarch.)

The crowning of King Robert the Bruce

And here is the ramp outside the gift shop in the square at the top of the Castle. It was made famous by my granddaughter Paula when Heather and I took her to the Castle about five years ago. A very young Paula went up the steps and down the ramp, over and over and over, so Heather and I had plenty of time to take turns shopping!

Erecting the bleachers for the Edinburgh Tattoo.



View from a Close off the Royal Mile down to the monument to Sir Walter Scott on Princes Street.

The Lindsay crest, at St Giles Cathedral.

A great rainbow from our hotel window.

And from yesterday, typical scenery on our drive to Dumfries, before we got to the Devils Beeftub:



And our huge car:

July 1 - Dumfries

Happy Canada Day! It's good to see Ottawa on Scottish TV here (because of the visit of the young royal couple) when we are so far from home.

We got our rental car this morning - a great big Volvo stationwagon. I don't drive a manual anymore and the automatics at the rental car agencies aren't available in compact or economy size. It's very comfortable and we had a beautiful drive from Edinburgh. Thank goodness for GPS. It used to be much harder navigating.

Highlight of the trip here from Edinburgh was the amazing scenery in and around the Devil's Beef Tub. I hadn't seen it since I was a child travelling in Britain with my family years ago.

Dumfries proved to be an impossible place to park in at midday, so we went early to our B&B to ask our landlady if we could check-in early and park the car. This was fine, and so we walked from there to the Dumfries Archives. We made a little progress with Katherine's Walker ancestors this afternoon, and will be continuing the search tomorrow.

June 30 - Edinburgh

No blog posting from me yesterday, since it was just a tiring and difficult travel day for us as we made the journey from Southampton to Edinburgh by coach, taxi, train, and taxi again, with endless delays all along the way.

Our hotel room in Edinburgh, which is clean and functional, naturally suffers by comparison with our ship stateroom!

I was on the hunt today to see memorials at Edinburgh Castle to some of my famous Scots ancestors who are connected to me through my 7th-great-grandmother, Helena Lindsay, who lived from 1643 to 1698 in Bristol. I have traced my line back to Helena personally; her ancestors have been researched by others, and they include more and more historical figures as we go farther back in time. [My other ancestors were labourers and farmers and weavers and such, and have proven impossible so far to trace back much farther than Helena Lindsay's time.] I have had a great time in the last couple of years learning about these very distant noble ancestors of mine - I certainly didn't pay much attention to their "life and times" in history classes at school.

Katherine hadn't visited the Castle for awhile, so off we went this morning. We took a hop-on-hop-off tourist bus as an easy way to get there, and that worked out very well for us.

My 20th great-grandfather met us at the Castle gates. King Robert the Bruce was the great-grandson of William Marshal who I visited at the Temple Church in London two weeks ago.

A little farther into the castle grounds we saw the plaque commemorating Thomas Randolph who took back the Castle in 1313 after 20 years occupation by the English.

Then we came to a beautiful chapel dedicated to Saint Margaret of Scotland who was a Queen of Scotland who lived from 1045 to 1093, so we are really getting far back in time. She was King Robert the Bruce's 4th great-grandmother, so I get to claim her too. It was her son King David I of Scotland who built the chapel in his mother's honour.

As well as visiting the relatives we took lots of pictures that I can't post because the hotel has only very low speed Internet. We had lunch at the Castle, and visited all the Castle gift shops, and then made our way down the Royal Mile. I can't show you that either, but I encourage you to look at the Royal Mile pictures my nephew posted on his blog here. Alex is spending the summer travelling in Europe and he was in Edinburgh several weeks ago.

At Katherine's suggestion we visited St_Giles'_Cathedral, which proved very interesting. I have seen it from the outside on several earlier visits to Edinburgh, but this was the first time that I can remember going inside.

By late afternoon we were back on the tourist bus and happy to be off our feet for the rest of our sightseeing. We saw a guard of bagpipers in full dress milling about outside of the Holyrood House and the Scottish Parliament. We've just learned on the TV news that the Queen is here today and that she inspected them shortly after we passed by. Apparently she will be opening the Scottish Parliament tomorrow.

So that is it for our first day in Edinburgh. Tomorrow we are off to Dumfries-shire to track down some of Katherine's ancestors.

Heading towards Southampton

Our last day on the cruise started the same as all our other days - with breakfast at the specialty restaurant that serve breakfast exclusively to suite passengers. Thanks to our free upgrade, this includes us. Today we decided to take a picture of the menu.

It's the same menu every day, but I don't think Katherine and I have had the same breakfast twice.

You probably can't read that, so let me elaborate. As soon as we arrive, our waiter brings strong English tea for Katherine and a cappuccino for me, and only then do we order. Here is the menu enlarged.

This is the reason that on several cruise days we haven't been the least bit hungry for lunch, and have just waited for dinner. (Though yes, I do admit there was that one day when we thought we were hungry enough mid-afternoon to order high tea in the cabin. Big mistake!)

The free upgrade that we got the most $$ value from was the complimentary Internet, which is usually very expensive on a ship.  Free laundry was also great, and we'll be heading to Scotland tomorrow with clean clothes in our bags, no thanks to any effort on our part. They put the actual cost of doing our laundry on our bills before zeroing it out again. This perk has been worth about $65 each, and has saved us so much time and hassle coping with the ship's laundromat that I may decide it's worth paying for if when I cruise again.

I don't suppose they treat someone to such a great upgrade twice in a row, and so it is going to be harder cruising again without the "suite amenities" now that I know what they are!

We are pretty much all packed up now and have to put our bags outside the door by 10pm for collection and offloading in Southampton in the morning. We have a good disembarkation time - 9am - especially considering that we have to put the clocks back an hour to English time tonight. So we'll get an extra hour's sleep.

This time tomorrow night we should be at our hotel in Edinburgh, all being well. I hope we have the connectivity promised by the hotel.

June 27 - Stavanger

Today started with a 6am arrival in Stavanger, which is the farthest south we have been in Norway. The port is very near the centre of town, and this is really all I got to see of the place.

By 8:30am I was on a boat ride to a tropical garden just outside Stavanger.

The family who own the garden have a nursery business in Stavanger and originally started the garden on the island where they had their summer cabin as a hobby. They have enlarged it year by year, and have been experimenting to see which plants they can get to thrive there. They have been growing palm trees farther north than anyone else they are aware of, largely due to a sheltered location. Bamboo is there as well:

We've seen houses and huts all over Norway with grass growing on the roof, but none quite as fancy as this one:

Water flows throughout the garden,



...and the fjord can be seen in the distance.

I was back at the ship by 11am, and met up with Katherine who had spent the morning exploring the town. After lunch we went together on a cruise of the Lysefjord.

The scenery was quite different from Geiranger Fjord last week, partly because we were in a small boat that could get in very close to the cliffs. 

And this is Pulpit Rock seen from the boat. You can see the view from up top here. That must be spectacular!

 

On the way back we saw some goats who are regularly fed by the ship's crew:

And this final shot is shows how close we got to the cliffs. The captain headed into a tiny cove, just to show off, I think.

And now we are back in our room again after another great meaL in the dining room. We have left Norway and will have a final day at sea tomorrow.

June 26 - heading south

There were beautiful blue skies and calm seas today as we sailed towards Stavanger, our final port in Norway. We followed the coastline all day, and are now seeing increasing sea traffic. Katherine has binoculars and checks out all the ships we see.

Last night was our last night of midnight sun. We are now back well below the Arctic Circle, and will actually have a sunset tonight at 11:21 pm.

It was a typical "at sea" day for us - port lecture in the morning, then a culinary demonstration and galley tour. After lunch we went to another talk from our Explorers speaker - this time she spoke about Sir Francis Drake. (Captain Cook is still my favourite though.) In between these, I got quite a bit of stitching done and Katherine finished another book.

Tonight was a Formal dinner, so we got all dressed up one last time. Then we went off to see one of the shows.

So the day flew by, and now we are counting up our Norwegian Kroner so we know just how much we each have to spend tomorrow on our last day in Norway.
Ahhh... it's a tough life!

June 25 - Lofoten Islands

36 hours after leaving Spitsbergen we are still above the Arctic Circle, at 68 degrees latitude. Caring about latitude was new to me until this trip, other than knowing where 49 degrees latitude north is.

Today I went to Nusfjord, a UNESCO world heritage fishing village with many wooden buildings preserved as they were in the 19th century.

Cod is the primary fish still caught here, and the village includes a cod liver oil factory, and "stocks" for drying the codfish as we had seen all over Norway.

Here's my favourite dried fish:

And more views of the village:

We drove for awhile around the islands, enjoying the scenery. It was good to see greenery in the landscape again, after the starkness of Spitsbergen.

Can you find the lamb in this picture?

Hint: The lamb is lying down after grazing on the roof of the barn. First find the bird in front of the chimney, then look behind it, a little to the left.

Our second stop was at the Lofotr Viking Museum. This was a reconstructed chieftain's longhouse, furnished as it would have been around 600 AD. It was abandoned about 950 AD when the whole community left to settle in Iceland.

A familiar sight from our trip to Denmark:

We heard a great presentation inside the longhouse from a guide in Viking dress.



The community kept to its belief in Norse gods like Thor and Odin.

Rejection of Christianity as the rest of Norway was accepting it is believed to be one of the reasons for the emigration to Iceland.

Here is someone else we saw in Denmark. Heather or Alex, can you remind me of his name?

More from the longhouse:

Then we had some more great views of the fjords on our way back to the dock.