Photo Pages:

Gowans

Contact:  Caerlaverock@yahoo.co.uk

April 2008:  Glennie added

January 2008: Copeland and Fox added

As with most people, I suspect, I started on my quest to track down my ancestors knowing only the names of my grandfather, his siblings, their place of birth, the probable name of their father, vague dates and a few family anecdotes. It didn't take me long to realise that research was not going to be simple – especially when having come to a brick wall with my mother’s Scottish ancestry, I decided to turn my attention to my father’s family, only to discover that family legend had it that his grandfather was John Clarke, a Londoner.  For a long while I didn’t bother going any further – finding a John Clarke from London was going to be impossible – until one day I was looking at parish records for another family in Suffolk and suddenly came across a record of my John Clarke which proved that he wasn’t actually a Londoner but born, bred and died in Suffolk!

This website is the product of more than five years’ worth of concentrated work on my ancestry, both Scottish and English – though, needless to say, there is still lots more research to go.

I do have more information than is displayed here, particularly on later generations, but unless I am a) certain they are dead and b) have no descendants, they don’t appear on the webpages.  Most of these pages stop at what I call the First World War Generation ­– those who were either old enough to fight in it, like my grandfathers, or who were born sometime in the decade prior to its outbreak.

On an incidental note, the name Woodmyre comes from the house where my grandfather was born in Bearsden.  It was built in the 1880s and still stands today, though not unfortunately in the family anymore.

Over the years I have also investigated a number of families unrelated to my own – usually because at the time I thought they were related!  I’ve decided to list them here because, having done the research, someone might find it of use…  I shall be adding to these quite a bit as I get various pieces of research in some sort of order.