New here and fellow scotsman from SoCalifornia

[tripleblessed]

Personally, I would describe you as an American with Scottish roots.

I usually say I was assembled in South Georgia from Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and English parts. And one Portuguese Jew. I am the 11th
generation in this country, several ancestors arriving from the British Isles by 1650. Only one, one of my great-grandmothers, arrived after 1776.
She was an orphan, arriving in 1860 at 14, with a 10 year old brother, thrown out of Ireland for having no living father. Thrown off the train in
western Pennsylvania to look for work as a maid. She was not allowed to keep her little brother with her, but was told, "There'll be work for him
at the end of the line." Many arrived in indenture for various reasons. At least one returned to the Isles when the argument started, but returned
after it was settled and bought back the same farm he sold to get back home to Skye.

My corner of southeast Georgia has very deep Scottish roots, as there was no money for troops to keep the Spanish in Florida. Oglethorpe spoke
with a couple of Highland lairds he knew who lived in London, saying he could not pay soldiers, but anyone willing to come and fight could have land .
Somewhere above 200 Scots settled in what is now Darien, Georgia, having told their kin, "Who cares if we die? Our children and grandchildren
will OWN LAND." Half died in the effort; another 200 or so arrived two years later, with the same result. They defeated the Spanish, securing the
border. Their children prospered on the land they received, and all across South Georgia the towns and the family cemeteries are filled with Scottish
surnames. My Scots lines came in through Virginia and North Carolina, leaving behind played out farms and moving on to fresh starts.

At least, that's how I heard it. For me personally, the stories are more revealing than what I was taught in school, though it's sometimes tricky
extracting what actually happened from the texts and stories. Census, tax, and military service records have been most helpful.

[Father Bill]

Interesting, the stories and opinions we hear about who we are. I've heard my own geneology and ancestry explained in slightly different although generally consistent ways. Interesting indeed! Might I suggest that we are whom we most closely identify as?

I remember reading somewhere that consistently throughout history, just over 7% of any generation did not (and I would guess do not today) have the father they thought they had/ have, so tracing back over generations, that 7% would be magnified by many "misconceptions" (pun intended) so that few of us would actually know our true ancestry.

Some would say that you can straighten that out to some extent with DNA testing, but there is no way I would personally choose or recommend sharing our most personal identifiers with a commercial (and not always trustworthy) enterprise, and which might even in turn be demanded some day by hostile, intrusive authorities. One of those companies recently foundered financially and their records are now in posession of another corporation whose contractual and legal responsibility to those whose records they hold is deeply questionable. What of privacy then?

You might even find out things that you might not like, or relatives you might wish you never had. Would you really like to discover that you were the close direct descendant of a serial killer, crook, a politician or dictator whose views horrify you, or some piratical individual? Although I have heard of many happy discoveries of genetic families and am even related to one such sucessful discovery (in which I was not involved, merely informed after the fact), I've also heard of some that were tragic when people were put in contact and there were unanticipated historical factors that generated hate and anger or harassment.

As far as paper records go, my geneologist/ historian friend pointed out to me once that nobody kept careful records on peasants... and that I qualified as such, so small hope of a 'good' trace. Further, in my own case, any written records further than three previous generations were lost from racist arson in a building that had contained the written record for my direct paternal line. I don't even have oral tradition beyond that.

Here's the thing though: my parents are the ones who raised and nurtured me, who cared for and about me. The same should be said for generations past and I hope others here and elsewhere have that happy situation as well. That is the ancestry I cherish, and the one that I recommend. As a priest, I can even point to divine scriptural approval of that point of view.

So then, to each, their own. I acknowledge that in this forum there are many who do not share my viewpoint, and I utterly respect theirs. Personally, I cherish and recommend most, the recent history of loving and "interesting" relationships, and see it as the most likely to be soul-satisfying. These are the stories, geneology, and ancestry taught me at my mother's knee. I do cherish those and find them quite sufficent and satisfying for me, and they are what I share with my son and his children.

[tripleblessed]

Interesting, the stories and opinions we hear about who we are. I've heard my own geneology and ancestry explained in slightly different although generally consistent ways. Interesting indeed! Might I suggest that we are whom we most closely identify as?

I remember reading somewhere that consistently throughout history, just over 7% of any generation did not (and I would guess do not today) have the father they thought they had/ have, so tracing back over generations, that 7% would be magnified by many "misconceptions" (pun intended) so that few of us would actually know our true ancestry.

I read about a court case citing research showing a slightly higher rate of "non-paternal events". Law and tradition has generally gone with parentage as known, if known. In certain case where a line failed, but where parentage was known, a simple name change allowed inheritance of lands and/or titles
by close relation. So, as in most aspects of life, some mutability occurs.

In my case, my father was adopted. His adoptive father and my mother were descended from the same man. Odd, but so. With three known and
published genealogists in the family, and 80 years of research, we're fairly sure we have as much accuracy as is possible. One of the three was hired as a consultant by one of the big companies to help them go public, so we gained free access to everything they have. Probably nobody here has interest in
my lines, but what is available might surprise you.

Even so, some lines disappear within three generations. Others tie into known figures in history, and their known and accepted lineage and might run as far back as the Norman Conquest. DNA is a different kettle of fish than accepted and legal inheritance lines. Lucy was Time Magazine's Woman of the Year
for, IIRC, 1999. Three or four years later, I read an article reporting a Cray supercomputer had determined that her DNA said her ancestors (how far
back not disclosed) lived not in Africa, but in Asia. Conversation about ten or so years ago with the founder of a DNA company revealed he had not heard that. Dr. Cabrera's stones include world maps showing a globe with continents still close enough together you could see how they fit into one land mass.
He was very willing to leave his patients waiting while conversing with interested parties, and showing the stones, some of which have dinosaurs carved
into them. And complex surgeries. Fascinating to stand next to a global map almost knee high that depicts a world (and history) so different than what is generally accepted and taught.

As Father Bill has said, family is family. However much or little information we have, we treasure it. What we can say with fair certainty is that history is way bigger than our knowledge of it.