This and all family history websites should really come with a health warning because researching your family history can become exceedingly addictive and if you're not careful, costly.

I've had to discipline myself to not run down every rabbit hole I find, and there are many, and note them down to return to later. Researching the history, people and places of the Highlands is a real passion and family history research is the perfect hit. It brings people and places to life.  Your perception of place changes when you begin to look at it through the eyes of the people who lived and worked there.  

This blog is where I will talk about my research.  In particular, I will focus on my own family history, but before I do, a little bit about me.

I live just outside the village of Culbokie, which is situated on the north side of the Black Isle.  I have lived here permanently since the late 80's, having grown up in North Yorkshire, Germany and a year in the Lake District.

My grandparents both came from England, but in the early 1970's they built a house in Fortrose, on the south side of the Black Isle.  A close relative commented a number of times that my Grandfather was returning home and mentioned the nearby places of Struy and Strathglass as places where family had come from.  

The Black Isle has always been home to me.  It's where we came on holiday and as I soon as I left school, this is where I came and this is where I've been ever since.  

We live on a 30 acre small holding, where for a time we bred Arabian horses.  We no longer breed, but we are still owned by a number of horses, poultry, sheeps and a solitary goat.  We also have 4 rescue hounds, 2 rescue cats and a young cat that arrived here in 2023 and decided she was staying.  All my work fits around the care and attention of our animals and land.  

I have known about the existence of Alexander McRae since I was wee and I was fascinated with him.  For a long time, we didn't have much information to go on.  Mum and my grandfather had gone along to the library in Inverness and had trawled through miles of microfiche  searching for him in the census returns.  They knew that my great great granny, Annie, and her sister, Mary, had been born in Strathglass and that the family had then moved to Lewis. Alexander and his wife Mary added 4 boys to their brood, 2 of whom were twins and became eminent doctors in South Africa.  All the McRae's were gaelic speakers.  We knew that Annie and possibly Mary went into service and moved to England.  For a long time, that was it.  That was all we knew.  

Alexander has unwittingly influenced much of my adult life.  I was fascinated by the possibility of a Gaelic heritage.  I love the language and I love living up here and working outdoors.  He led me to a degree in Gaelic Scotland and a Masters in Highlands and Islands Literature.  I read lots of books on this area, hoping for a mention of Alexander.  I dabbled in Ancestry, hunting for Alexander and his family in Strathglass and finding absolutely nothing.  The only evidence they had ever lived in Strathglass came from the Lewis census of 1871 which states that both girls were born there.  For a few more years they remained an allusive mystery.

Mum, my daughter Eilidh, and I, visited the graveyard attached to Struy Church, as it was thought that Mary may have returned to Strathglass and was buried there, but nothing.  By this point I had become a tour guide.  I could have made a fortune from the number of guests who asked if I would help them research their ancestors. However, if I couldn't find my own family, I certainly couldn't take money to try and find other peoples ancestors.   Places, historical events and social history I was great with, but to begin researching family histories I had to know what I was doing.

I enrolled on Pharos courses and attended courses at the Highland Archive centre and realised that once I knew where and how to look, I was just adding another set of resources to my researching skills.  I couldn't wait to continue the search for my own family members and I very quickly made a surprising discovery that changed who we are and where we thought we came from.