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Genealogy Home Page ofRuss McGillivrayGenealogy has been a hobby of more or less intense interest for over 25 years. My interest in family history has progressed to the point that I want to create, preserve and pass on the stories of our family. This phase started simply with collecting all of the 'facts' about a particular ancestor in a narrative form as an aid to further research. Soon, however, I found that the pieces of data started to form a coherent and compelling story. In some cases, I found that I was recovering stories that had been lost. No one of my grandfather's generation remembered any longer what part of Scotland their own grandfather, Donald McGillivray, had come from. Now I believe our McGillivray roots are in Islay - famous equally as the home of great malt scotch and as the seat of the 'Lord of the Isles'. More than that, we now have images of Donald's childhood on the pioneer farms of Oro Township, the tragic choice he had to make as a young boy and his adventures as a sailor on the Great Lakes, as well as his untimely death in a railway accident. There is the strange tale of my direct ancestor Richard Watson Dickson. He rose from rural Lancashire to become a medical doctor and an authority on agriculture and gardening. He encyclopedic works were published and remained respected texts for decades. Yet he ended his life in poverty and the treatment of his body after his death made headlines across England. There are so many other stories to tell: the Loyalists who came out of the Mohawk Valley and Hudson River of New York and from New Jersey to start over again in Ontario; the Berczy settlers from Germany to Markham Township in 1794 by way of the Genesee; the Gaelic-speaking settlers from Tiree where there are no trees and it rarely snows, who faced the forests and blizzards of Bruce County on the shores of Lake Huron; the sons of the first settlers who defended their new homes in the War of 1812-14; the Canadian-born farmers, clerks and students who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War 1; and more. |
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© 2000-2011 Russ McGillivray |
Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.(Deut 7:9) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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