Quote Originally Posted by Steve Ashton View Post
If you have not yet caught on to what our resident experts are saying -
This whole thing is not about your surname.
It is not some romantic notion that became popular in the Victorian era where everyone who is of Scottish descent can find their Clan on some list.
And it is not the current "neo-celtic" idea of 'this all goes back to antiquity and has come down to us today unchanged."

It is actually far more complex that any of those ideas.

Do your genealogy. Spend the time to do the research and find the facts of where your people come from. Typing your surname into a google search is not doing your genealogy.
I suck at words sometimes. My apologies. One of my primary tasks after chatting with you last week was to get in touch with my cousins and get more information on where we're from.

Extensive genealogy research has been conducted by my cousins since the late '70s, resulting in half a dozen banker's boxes of copied documents tracked down (slowly being scanned)Most work was done before Google was thing, the old fashioned way. What we do know is one line of the family is from NE Scotland, what is now between Dores and Inverness, which happens to be tied to the Mithchell surname.

There are gaps, dead ends galore we will likely never fill in. Every so often, a few strands are unraveled. Sadly there has been a good deal of "good luck with that" as swaths of the paper trail ends right around 1861 ~ 1865 here in the states. Some for the family lore fits the paper trail, some not-so-much, and other pieces fit some if you apply accurate detective work to unravel the truths, and most of that truth is the kin were a bunch of near-do-well farmers and mercenaries that held very little, if any influence. DNA tests are showing some interesting and unexpected results leading us in directions we never imagined. One cousin put it "Our family tree looks more like a poorly pruned bush, full of holes, with a few twigs sticking out in strange directions

The disappearance of documents are highly interesting, and I feel is indeed being highly romanticized. There's a trail, and then gaps for no apparent reason. Along the line, something happened - and we may never know. Was it something the ancestors did? Or was it simply a fire in the church where records were kept?

There's more we don't know than what we do know and I strive to keep learning.