***************************************************************************** This email and any files transmitted with it are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. ***************************************************************************** Extract from The Northern Times (and Weekly Journal for Sutherland and the North) 16 March 2001: Mr Alan Lannon, headmaster of Thurso's Miller Academy, to give a talk in Golspie about family history, including "his own maternal family, the Melvilles, who lived in Strathbrora in 1670, long before the coming of the Great Sheep. Mr Lannon has researched the fortunes of the family over several generations, tracing as many as 2700 connected names in his quest of this ubiquitous tribe. "I have got back as far as 1730 with my own family in the Doll area, but I have a reference to a John Melville paying Hearth Tax somewhere above Carrol 60 years before that." Others lived up the Blackwater above Balnacoil at a place called Crislich and that family, cleared in 1820, ended up in Edinburgh and then in Australia." Malcolm Bangor-Jones