It’s been a busy month of marketing, promoting and researching, since I kicked off this blog.  Posts will become more frequent from now on.  

 At the end of my first post, I mentioned a surprising discovery. 

 My Mum had varying bits of information on the McRae’s.  They were easy to trace in Lewis from 1871.  Alexander, Mary and their 6 children all appear on the 1871 Census.  Anne and Mary are shown as being born in Strathglass, whilst the four boys were born in Gress, Lewis.  Pre 1871, everything was a mystery.  

Taken from the 1871 census. Crown Copyright National Records of Scotland

 By the time I began properly researching our family history, I had the benefit of Scotland’s People and sites like Ancestry and Find My Past, but none of that was helping.  I couldn’t find any reference to the family being in Strathglass.  We double checked Struy graveyard several times over, but none of the McRae’s buried there were our McRae’s.  Despite the information in the 1871 census, I was beginning to doubt they’d ever been in Strathglass.  

 I tried a different tack.  Instead of looking for them on earlier census forms, I decided to try and find Alexander and Mary’s marriage certificate and this was when I made the first of several surprising and exciting discoveries. 

I carried out initial searches, looking for them in Glenelg and Strathglass but nothing came up,  so I looked to see if they had married in Lewis, and jackpot. 

At first, I didn’t think I had the right couple.  Everything matched but the marriage date was 1866 and Anne and Mary were both born several years before this date, however, under Alexander’s name was a word that at first glance looked a bit like ‘tricolour’, but on proper examination said ‘widower’.  Alexander had been married before. 

Marriage Certificate for Alexander and Mary McRae

This discovery raised the strong possibility that Mary McKenzie was not Anne and Mary’s mother, as my mother and grandfather had always believed. Which led to the question, 'If she wasn’t, then who was?'