It is indeed good to be back again and see that the list is as active as ever and that listers are prepared to share so much.... As in every family there are stories and legends and mystery people.....i have always investigated each claim as much as possible. I was brought up outside of Scotland and rarely saw my mother's Scots rellies..even my grandfather lived in England.....but I am blessed in that I have a cousin who has always kept contact with my mother. The cousin's mother cared for her mother (my gt Granny) who was a real family person and reularly went off from Dumfries to Creetown and Elrig on family visits and of course where they went my cousin also went....then when my cousin's mother was elderly my cousin cared for her mother and her granny. So my cousin was a real authority on the family as she had personal knowledge of the people and also inherited all her granny's extensive photo and document archive and could name almost everyone in the photos. She was kind enough to share this with me when I started my family history project and I digitised her entire collection...a week of solid scanning all day every day and then a year sorting it out and categorising it. There was a rumour of someone who was "turned" from Catholic to CofS but nobody knew who it was.....i found it was my gt gt grandma. There was a newspaper clipping of the local Dumfries paper about the genealogical research commissioned into John Paul Jones....and a letter to the editor from my Gt granny's neice who claimed that she was the nearest surviving rellie through her mother..that took 3 months to resolve..she was related but through the brother of the second husband of JPJ's sister....in her letter to the editor she descibed the area around Glencaple where her ancestors lived in great detail, and of course I learned a lot about JPJ's family in the process. There was a newspaper clipping from NZ of an interview with my Gt uncle about his first voyage as a young man from Dumfries to New Zealand as he had by then been in NZ for 60 years...he started to keep a daily diary from the day he left home to his death and the clipping was composed of extracts of the days of the journey from Dumfries to London and then the voyage to NZ. There was a custom up until the 1920's for first cousins and more distant cousins to marry which drove me mad in the beginning but my cousin helped me out with placing some of them....but there was one mystery person and whenever her name came up my gt granny changed the subject.....i found out that this was an illegitimate child raised by her grandparents and then married off to a cousin and thus accepted back into the family.... Unbeknown to my brother in Canada had letters written by my grandfather during WW1 to his brother and mother and also he had the original handwritten journal some 280 pages from my Gt uncle in NZ, in this he describes in great detail his life from leaving home until shortly before his death in NZ. Another cousin in London had a typewritten version of the same journal that had been passed to her father for editing but my gt uncle died before it was completed. But all that aside my richest source has always been this mailing list where so many unsung heroes have helped me over the years. So now I have become the leading authority on our family and have stimulated many cousins to join the project..after all it is all about sharing.... Regards Anton