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Published: March 13th 2023
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Och, we were soo hot overnight. It’s always these doonas they give you, with no sheets. Our cottage had warmed nicely with those mobile column heaters, including one upstairs in our bedroom, but we found it awfully hot. Tonight we will have a wee window open, and we took the heater downstairs to help warm that space.
It rained most of the night and was still drizzling this morning so we swapped our plans for today and did Tuesday itinerary instead of Monday itinerary. Today we set off for Keith, driving through and around many localities that my paternal ancestors lived in. It’s lovely to view their homelands, and see where they came from. Our trip from here on is 90% about Alec’s ancestors. Alec always lived with my grandparents and five years ago when my brother and I did our DNA we discovered we had no matches with pop’s family, but we now have over 100 matches with Alec’s family. So Alec was our grandfather, and he was a lovely man. I feel sad that he was never given the honour of being our grandfather, never had the recognition for always being there in our lives. In past visits
we have toured my other family towns, and Tom’s, and this trip was to see where my grandfather came from.
First stop was The Clune, which turned out to be one substantial farmhouse and a gigantic barn. Andrew Milton, our 4greats grandfather was born here in 1778.
The next stop was Deskford which used to have a kirk, but it’s now a ruins, and the kirkyard is still in use for burials. I found a few headstones with our family names on them, but no direct ancestors. As we peaked out to a river at the bottom of the hill, Tom saw a deer run off into the bush. the Deskford Kirk saw the baptisms of 7 of my direct ancestors, and three marriages - mostly the Milton family.
We continued on to Berryhillock, another place the Milton’s lived. Part of it has become a relatively new village, but I feel it was possibly the name of a property back in the early 1800s. We also drove through Craibstone, an area where my 7greats grandfather was born in 1670.
We arrived in Keith to find it a substantially
larger town than we expected, with several churches, so we don’t know which one was involved with our family. We had read about an interesting coffee shop so sought it out for lunch. There was little traffic and few people on the streets - 8 felt like everyone was staying at home to keep warm, but we discovered they must’ve all been in coffee shops if this one was one to go by - it was very popular. We had a lovely lunch - Tom had a ham and cheese omelette, I had a scrumptious haddock fish pie. There was still snow laying around in front yards and car parks. At the supermarket they have a cover so the trolleys don’t get rained and snowed on, whereas we sometimes have covers to stop the cars from getting too hot.
After lunch we returned to the cottage to light a fire and relax! Bliss.
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