Where do you come from?

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the Universe 'peoples.' Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of Nature, a unique action of the total Universe.

-Alan Watts

Inside all of us lies a hidden history, the story of an immense journey told by our DNA. Deoxyribonucleic Acid is the biochemical molecule at the heart of the reproduction of all life, plants as well as animals. And since the discovery of its structure in 1953, scientists have pieced together the epic narrative of how human beings populated our planet.

-http://www.scotlandsdna.com/

Where do you come from?

"Cuimhnichibh air na daoine bho'n d'thainig sibh." ("Remember the people whom you come from." -Old Gaelic Proverb)

Some years ago I was persuaded to do a yDNA test for genealogical reasons. The primary object was to validate a Garvie family tradition that the Garvies of Perthshire were indeed descendants of John Garbh Maclean of Coll. I was curious. What did my yDNA tell me about my own "long journey"?

Like countless generations before me, I have been consumed by the questions, "Where have I come from? Why am I here? Why now?" I have approached these questions in previous blogs but I felt it was time to tackle the topic again.

When I first read the introduction to Bill Bryson's, A Short History of Nearly Everything, I was transfixed reading the paragraph where he says...

"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of you forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly - in you."

I don't think anybody has said it better than that! Hence my interest in my ancestry and genealogy.

Close Genealogy
This much I knew of my paternal line with a certain degree of confidence: I was born in Ladysmith, Natal South Africa. My father was born in Johannesburg. His father, my grandfather, in Knysna. His father, my great grandfather, came from Aberdalgie in Perthshire, Scotland. His ancestors in turn, I learnt, came from Perth, Kinnoull, and Scone. The further back I went in time the more did my ancestral history merge into tradition and legend and increasingly, the mists of myth.

Perthshire tradition had it that the Garvies were descended from John Garbh, seventh MacLean of Coll, through one of his sons, probably John of Totronald.   This son was wounded at the Battle of Inverkeithing in 1651, and did not return to Coll. His three sons (or grandsons) rented Upper Balgarvie, Lower Balgarvie, and Mill of Balgarvie in the parish of Scone, Perthshire from the Earl of Mansfield. Their descendants were tenants of Muirtown, Haggis Hall and several other farms near Perth.
(According to a letter from J C Garvie Macleod to the editor  of  the Oban Times, Spenthorn, West Park, Leeds. Date unknown. Also see A E Garvie, Memories and Meanings of My Life, 15.)

In Agents of Change, Scots in Poland 1800-1918 by Mona Kedslie McLeod (Tuckwell Press ISN#1 86232 081 0 ) page 116 we find...

"The Garvie brothers were descended from the Macleans of Coll. Backing the wrong side in the first Jacobite Rising of 1689, they forfeited their lands, adopted their nickname 'garbh', the Gaelic for rough or strong, and moved to Perthshire in search of a living. By the end of the eighteenth century Perth had become one of the centres of the developing linen industry and was enjoying a building boom..."

To date I had not found historical genealogical records to confirm this. I still wanted to know where I came from! So I resorted to DNA analysis. My yDNA Haplogroup turned out to be: R-M207 Subgroup: R1b1b2-M269

Y-chromosome DNA (yDNA) is a type of DNA that is only carried by men and is inherited directly from their fathers. Men who share a common paternal ancestor will have virtually the same yDNA, even if that male ancestor lived many generations ago. Theoretically then, sooner or later, as more data becomes available and more matches come to light I should be able to deduce whether there are Garvie links to the Hebrides and specifically to the Isle of Coll or not. Was it just accident that in a way I had come geographically full cycle and now stay where the last of the lairds of Coll died?...

Coll was home to a branch of the Clan Maclean for 500 years, not all of which were peaceful. In 1590 the Macleans of Duart invaded their cousins on Coll with the intention of taking the island for themselves. A battle was fought at Breachacha Castle where the Coll clan overwhelmed the Duarts, chopped off their heads and threw them in the stream, which is still known as "the stream of the heads". The Macleans of Coll retained their baronial fief and Castle of Breachacha until 1848 when Alexander Maclean of Coll emigrated to Natal, South Africa where he died unmarried.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coll

This more distant biological journey in time is as interesting and fascinating as that of my immediate documented ancestry. We carry within us the genetic material and possibly coded memories that go back to creation itself!

Deep Genealogy
When the last Ice Age began to abate ~13,000 years ago and living conditions slowly improved across Europe, localized populations migrated from west Asia R1b1b2-M269 moved primarily throughout western Europe, creating opposite geographic distributions which are still evident today. R1b1b2-M269 is found at very high frequencies (50-80%) throughout western Europe particularly the Celtic populations in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, especially the Hebrides. Geneticists are pretty sure about the broad details of this remarkable migration of Celts. It is reasonably well documented for instance in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA)#R1b1a2_.28R-M269.29

Even Deeper Genealogy
Haplogroup R is defined by a DNA marker known as M207. Everyone who carries this marker today descends from a common paternal ancestor who lived about 30,000 years ago in west Asia. To date, over thirty subclades of haplogroup R have been identified, of which, R1a1-M17 and R1b1b2-M269 (historically called R1b3) are the most well described. Both of these subgroups are indicators of European ancestry with haplogroup R1a1-M17 most representative of Eastern Europeans and R1b1b2-M269 most characteristic of Western Europeans. Originating in the regions of modern day Turkey I saw correlations with the Keltoi and the diaspora of nations alluded to in Genesis and Josephus.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Further back, as members of the human family, all people living today can trace their earliest paternal ancestors to populations that lived approximately 100,000 years ago in eastern Africa and possibly southern Africa described as the "Cradle of Humankind"  where as providence had destined I would spend a number of years of my life working probing the night skies tracking spacecraft. These early humans became spread throughout the African continent, and beginning ~50,000 years ago, a series of complex migrations moved them out of Africa into regions of Asia and beyond to eventually populate every major area of the world.

Very Deep Genealogy
Some have suggested there might have been, startling as it may sound, an inter-galactic intervention at some time in the distant past or, possibly occurring all the time! Molecular biologists have been perplexed by segments of DNA that appear to be older than the Earth itself suggesting an origin beyond our Solar System.

Dr. Francis Crick,  Nobel Prize Winner and one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule suggests in his book, Life Itself: Its Origins and Nature (1981), that  primordial life was shipped to Earth in "spaceships" of some kind. Crick makes this startling proposition: "Life did not evolve first on Earth; a highly advanced civilization became threatened so they devised a way to pass on their existence. They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria or meteorites with the hope that it would collide with another planet. It did, and that's why we're here."

Terming his model "Directed Panspermia", Crick suggested that a "spaceship" carrying "large samples of... microorganisms" was sent to the Earth billions of years ago by an extraterrestrial civilisation - either as an experiment, preparation for colonisation or a genetic Noah’s Ark of some sort. (Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E. "Directed Panspermia", Icarus, 19, 341 (1973), quoted in David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight)

Zecharia Sitchin, at the other extreme, suggests a much later Mesopotamian intervention based on his reading of Sumerian texts and the first eleven chapters of Genesis, speculating in his Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries and elsewhere, that humans were biologically engineered about 6000 years ago. Sitchin's views, though no less extreme than Crick's, are generally disregarded by the scientific community but have become popular among the general public as evidenced by the unusual demand for his numerous writings.

Sumerian Version: Ningishzidda, Enki and Ninmah create Adamu

It is speculated by both rational scientists and mavericks that our DNA could be encoded with messages from these other civilizations. Ancestral memories par excellence, beyond our wildest dreams, could be encoded in our very DNA. Unknown cosmic entities may have programmed our genetic make-up so that when we reached a certain level of intelligence, we would be able to access this information, and they could therefore "teach" us about ourselves, and how to progress. (For more about so-called "Junk DNA" see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA. On "DNA Activation" see http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf.)  Human DNA appears to be a lot more pliable (eg.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21091066) and mysterious (eg. the DNA Phantom Effect http://www.thescienceforum.com/biology/1144-dna-phantom-effect.html) than previously thought.

Photo: NASA

Though cautious in their conjectures and conclusions, exobiologists are now more and more convinced that not only could microorganisms proliferate throughout creation but that it is equally possible that actual alien life forms might have traveled from other worlds to Earth! The Universe could be teeming with life. Celestial life! Retired Senator John Glenn and former Astronaut once cryptically remarked...

Back in those glory days.... Some people asked....were you alone out there? We never gave the real answer, and yet we see things out there, strange things, but we know what we saw out there. And we couldn't really say anything. The bosses were really afraid of this, they were afraid of the War of the Worlds type stuff, and about panic in the streets. So we had to keep quiet. And now we only see these things in our nightmares or maybe in the movies, and some of them are pretty close to being the truth" (NBC TV 6th March 2001).

Potent words! Tongue in cheek? A Freudian slip? An intentional admission?  (See http://www.enterprisemission.com/glenn.htm) Or are we standing on the very Threshold of an exciting new era, the Kingdom of Heaven itself? I would not be surprised! In fact, we always have!

At times I had to tread

Where not a star was found

To lead or light me, overhead;

Nor footprint on the ground.

I toiled among the sands

And stumbled with my feet;

Or crawled and climbed with knees and hands,

Some future path to beat.

-Gerald Massey, The Natural Genesis.

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

In Search of a Forgotten Grave - Alexander Maclean of Coll

In Search of a Forgotten Grave

Alexander Maclean of Coll 1827-1875

A Personal Quest

Alexander, eldest son of Hugh of Coll, succeeded his father as representative of the descendants of John Garbh. He was tall and athletic, modest, and full of kindness.  He emigrated to South Africa in 1849.  He died at Umgeni, near Durban, on Sunday afternoon, July 11th, 1875. He was in the forty-seventh year of his age. He was succeeded in the chieftanship of the Macleans of Coll by his brother, John -Hector-Norman.

-Rev A. Maclean Sinclair, The Clan Gillean, 1899, p.383.

View from Coll

Family oral tradition had it that we, the Garvies, were descendants of the Macleans of Scotland. Scottish theologian, Alfred Ernest Garvie, in his auto-biography, Memories and Meanings of My Life, wrote...

After the defeat at Killiecrankie, the [Maclean] clansmen were scattered. Some of the Macleans settled in Perthshire, and assumed the name Garvie, which is found in a parish register in 1690; and is said to be derived from a Gaelic word garbh, meaning strong or rough. The Garvies in Perthshire claimed descent from Lachlan Maclean of Coll, and the Garvies in Ross-shire had a McLeod for ancestor. Three Garvies (John, James, and Patrick) settled at Balgarvie, which had already long borne that name.... (p.15). 

In a letter from J C Garvie Macleod to the editor of the Oban Times, (date unknown) it is said that the Garvies of Perthshire "are descended from John Garbh, seventh Maclean of Coll, through one of his sons, probably John of Totaronald." According to him, John Garbh was wounded at the Battle of Inverkeithing, Fifeshire (1651) and did not return to Coll. His three sons (or grandsons) rented Upper Balgarvie, Lower Balgarvie and the Mill of Balgarvie in the Perthshire, Parish of Scone from the Earl of Mansfield. Their descendants were tenants of Muirton, Haggis Hall and other farms near Perth.

My genealogical interest goes back to the early 1960s when, as a schoolboy, I first read about Alfred Ernest Garvie. Increasingly I became aware of my Scottish roots. In the course of time it also came to my attention that a Maclean chief lay buried in Africa somewhere. Highland families were in dire financial straits during the 1800s because of famine and so-called "clearances"  and had left the Hebrides and Highlands in large numbers to settle in the Colonies.

My quest began in real earnest when in 2004 cousins, Ken and Eleanor Garvie, afforded us an unforgettable trip to Mull and Iona,  the Maclean Islands.  I was not even aware of Coll which was to become the focus of my research. As I stood on the battlements of Duart Castle looking across the sea I pondered the pluck and plight of the Macleans. They were fighters to the end and stood true in battle and circumstance.  I returned home even more enthused. There were family roots to be researched and there was a grave to be found.

The Search Begins

Intrigued, I felt the need to acquaint myself with the histories of the Macleans of Scotland. I was fortunate to obtain copies of  JP Maclean's A History of the Clan MacLean and Rev. A Maclean Sinclair's The Clan Gillean. It was from John Patterson Maclean's history that I was first to learn about Chief Alexander Maclean (1849-1875)...

Alexander, sixteenth and last of Coll - Sliochd Iain Ghairbh - inherited in a remarkable degree the characteristics of his family, great benignity and kindliness of disposition, which made his forefathers among the most popular landlords of their day. In 1849, he emigrated to Natal, Africa, where he died, July 11, 1875, aged forty-seven. He was never married. In him the family of Coll, in the direct line, became extinct.

There was my first clue. I now had a name, a place, and a date.  Alexander Maclean died in Natal, South Africa in 1875. By this time, in 1991, I had myself been transferred to Durban in KwaZulu-Natal.

Maclean Sinclair was more specific as to where...

Alexander, eldest son of Hugh of Coll, succeeded his father as representative of the descendants of John Garbh. He was tall and athletic, modest, and full of kindness.  He emigrated to South Africa in 1849.  He died at Umgeni, near Durban, on Sunday afternoon, July 11th, 1875.

I was astonished. We lived just above the Umgeni Estuary in Durban! The question now arose, where was Chief Alexander Maclean laid to rest? His grave could not be in the nearby Stamford Hill Cemetery which was post-1875. Queries addressed to the Local History History Museum and the Killie Campbell Library  proved fruitless. I eventually, after considerable correspondence with historians, archivists, and churches, both local and abroad, found Alexander Maclean's Estate Papers in 2007. The search was only beginning!

The Estate Papers of Alexander Maclean

I was naturally curious and anxious to locate Alexander's grave.  It was suggested that I should direct my queries to the Anglican Church since, being a British Colony, the spiritual care of British settlers were overseen by the Church of England. He could be buried in the St Paul's Church burial ground, some suggested. I visited St Pauls hoping to find, if not a grave, then surely, a memorial of sorts. There was none. The original St Pauls had been destroyed by a fire.

The Bishop's Office in Pietermaritzburg yielded very little information. I then discovered that the Church of England burial ground had in fact been incorporated into the West Street Cemetery but was actually some distance from St Pauls itself. Initially I did not know this. I visited the West Street Cemetery several times. Unfortunately no record of such a grave could be found in the West Street Registers. This was deeply disappointing.  Records had previously been destroyed in a fire, I was told. Many hours scouting round the cemetery yielded no evidence of the Laird's final resting place. Some said part of the cemetery had made way for a freeway and possibly the grave did not exist anymore.

Fortunately, just as I was beginning to despair, I then located the Estate Papers for Alexander Maclean. These were lodged in the National Archives Depot in Pietermaritzburg! Not in Durban as I had expected. The Executor of his estate was none other than his brother-in-law, Ashe Windham of Greytown near Pietermaritzburg. Alexander's sister, Juliet, had also settled and married in Natal. I had not known that. Much to my delight, among the papers was a receipt for a grave plot that was eventually to lead me to that of Chief Alexander.

Durban Sept 30th 1875

Received if A S Windham Esq "Exor to the late Alexander McLean Esq" (by payment for Mr Thos. Drew Undertaker) the sum of Six Pounds six shillings for the purchase of a plot of ground in the St Pauls Church Cemetery - measuring 12 feet frontage in a straight line and next to Mrs Benningfields at the south end by eight feet wide - to be held in perpetuity for internments - subject to the Subs (?) and Regulations made from time to time - for the management of the said Cemetery.

As Witness my hand this day and year above written.

For the Minister & Churchwarden
of St Pauls Cemetery
G W Saker
Actin Sexton

There it was, St Pauls Cemetery! If I could locate the Benningfield plot it would then be relatively easy to find Alexander's grave.

Also among the Estate Papers was an invoice dated the 28th September 1875 from the Undertaker suggesting that the deceased had temporarily been interred in the vault of a Mr Lloyd.

To Cost of Ground 12ft x 8 £6 6 0
 " Buidling Brick Vault 8ft x4
 " Opening & Closing Mr Lloyds Vault
 " Removing body of the late Mr McLean to new Vault & etc  £25  - -

West Street Cemetery, Durban

With this information I returned to the West Street Cemetery Offices and with their kind assistance I soon located both the Benningfield and Lloyd plots. Much to my relief, these were recorded in their registers.

The Benningfield Family Plot

The Lloyd Family Plot

To the south of the Benningfield family plot was a lone, neglected grave with neither headstone nor inscription. It lay between the Benningfield and Lloyd graves. Could this be the grave? It was in a state of bad repair. Had it been vandalized or just severely weathered over the years?  I was hoping to find something more becoming of a Scottish Chief. My heart sank. Whose grave was this? Could the Cemetery Superintendent identify this grave? So many questions welled up within me. Had we found the missing grave?

The Unmarked Grave of Alexander Maclean
The Iron Railing of the Benningfield Plot casting its shadow
to the "south end" across the modest Celtic Grave

I hastened back to the Superintendent and enquired who was buried in Section 8, plot 24? Quickly the Superintendent found  old scrappy maps for the Church of England Section, Block 8 of the West Street Cemetery and there it was, no.24,  "Alex Macbean"!

For me, finding and then confirming the grave, was one of those rare "Eureka!" moments in my life.

From the Estate Records, I also knew that a monument was ordered for the tomb. Ashe Windham states...

...I have with the consent of the heirs of the said Alexander Maclean entered into a Contract with [...] Smith of Pietermaritzburg for the preparing and erecting a tomb stone to be placed over the grave of the said Alexander Maclean at a cost of Twenty eight pounds Sterling ...

The tombstone no longer exists. No picture of it has come to light. One can now only but imagine the design and inscription of the monument. Would it have really been ornate as I might have envisaged? Or did it simply record his name, his birth and death, and perhaps The Maclean crest and the words, “Sliochd Iain Ghairbh”?

I returned to the grave and stood there a long while, deeply affected, reflecting on the arduous discovery of this humble grave and the valiant and mysterious man who had been laid there to rest. As a minister I had many times recited the words, "from dust to dust". Never did those words seem more poignant than that day.

James Robertson (1799-1876) Sheriff Substitute, a Coll family friend was early impressed by the young Alexander Maclean who he fondly called "Alick". When he first met him he recorded in his Journal...

Saw young Coll for the first time and his brother John. The former is a handsome well grown youth of 16 or 17, near 6 feet high, quiet and modest. He is dark, round faced and black eyed. 

That was  the beginning of an abiding friendship that was cut short when the family left Coll in the mid-1840s, impoverished and destitute. The grim story is dramatically documented by Coll historian, Nicholas Maclean Bristol, in his monumental work, From Clan to Regiment. Alexander had emigrated and found himself north of Durban where he bartered beads for ngunis with the Zulu tribes. His father had always intended him to become a merchant but the older Coll would never have envisaged it in the Kingdom of the Zulus.

On his death, an anonymous correspondent wrote...

A paragraph in the Natal Colonist gives intelligence of the death of Alex. Maclean, Esq, of Coll, on 11th July [1875],at the early age of 47.... the subject of this short memoir emigrated to Port Natal in 1849. On two or three occasions he revisited England, and thirteen months ago spent a short time in his native district of the Highlands. Though so long absent and so young when he left, he yet retained the most lively recollections of his old acquaintances and associates, who can never forget the pleasure it seemed to afford him to meet them again, nor the eager grasp of his hand and the sparkle of his eye, lighted up by sincere affection, when they chanced to meet. To those who knew Mr Maclean from boyhood as some of us did, when the slim gentle youth headed our many deer-hunting parties on his father's estates, accompanied by his younger brother — now also no more — and our boating expeditions in quest of wild fowl, &c — to such, certainly, his outward appearance was much changed - a tropical climate had ripened that youth into manhood of the most prepossessing appearance. That splendid figure, manly form, straight as a pine, a man among a thousand struck us with admiration, and still more so when we found the same gentle, mild, unassuming, affectionate disposition that distinguished his youth.

The obituary in the Natal Colonist read...

The deceased gentleman was one of our oldest colonists, and the predecessor of Mr T Reynolds in the proprietorship of Oaklands, Umhlali. He was the eldest member of a very old Highland family, a considerable traveller, having visited South America and British Columbia. He was also one of the earliest visitors to the Diamond Fields, but he invariably returned to Natal after these more or less protracted absences. One of the gentlest yet bravest of men, Mr Maclean was thoroughly esteemed by all who knew him. He was not only a considerable traveller, but was an enthusiastic hunter and sportsman, and his commanding and powerful frame gave no token of so early an end. He was not married, and his only near relative in Natal is Mrs AF Windham, who was near him when he died; The funeral took place on Monday morning in the burial ground of the Church of England, and was attended by many of the friends of the deceased, whose loss will be most sincerely deplored by them. Archdeacon Lloyd read the offices of the church.

-Nicholas Maclean Bristol, From Clan to Regiment, p. 565

Parish Registers, 1850-2004 South Africa, Natal, Durban,
St Paul Burials 1849-1925 Image 87 of 333 No.870

https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1951-23609-32620-66?cc=1468076&wc=M93C-3M3:n331387211

A deep satisfaction came over me. Whether Alexander Maclean was a distant cousin - Sliochd Iain Ghairbh - mattered little to me in that moment. I simply felt an indescribable affinity and connection to this remarkable, enigmatic man. We had a common connection with the land of our forbears. My own broken life was represented now by this lonely, weathered grave. A wave of awe came over me. I left the cemetery both curious and perplexed, wondering, questioning why Providence should have led me to this unpretentious, unmarked grave, mysteriously drawn to it by an inexplicable compulsion?

Scotland our Mither --- this from your sons abroad,
Leavin' tracks on virgin veld that never kent a road,
Trekkin' on wi' weary feet, an' faces turned fae hame,
But lovin' aye the auld wife across the seas the same.
...
Scotland our Mither --- since first we left your side,
From Quilimane to Cape Town we've wandered far an' wide;
Yet aye from mining camp an ' town, from koppie an' karoo,
Your sons sicht kindly, auld wife, send hame their love to you.

-Charles Murray

oOo

Links:
Alexander Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/in-search-of-forgotten-grave-alexander.html
Juliet Maclean: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/juliet-alexa-maclean-1826-1909-personal.html
Lost Clan Documents: http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-lost-documents-of-coll.html

Sources:
Many contributors assisted me in this search and acknowledge especially Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, John McLean, Ken and Eleanor Garvie, the Staff of local Museums, Archive Depots, Libraries, and Cemeteries. Their generous help was much appreciated.
Journal of James Robertson, Sherriff Substitute at Tobermory 1844
James Irvine Robertson, Introduction to the Journal of James Robertson 1799-1876
JP Maclean, A History of the Clan MacLean.
Rev. A Maclean Sinclair, The Clan Gillean. http://archive.org/details/clangilleanwithp00sinc
Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, From Clan to Regiment.
Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, Warriors and Priests, The History of the Clan Maclean 1300-1570.
McLeans of Coll Home Page, http://www.mcleanofcoll.com
Celtic Magazine http://www.electricscotland.com/history/celtic/index.htm

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Krotoa: Daughter of the Cape

Robben Island, Birthplace of Krotoa
Photograph by Roger de la Harpe, Getty Images

It is not right for us today to write off our past generations and pretend that history began when we were born.

-Es'kia Mphahlele, 1986

As a person who is from the line of Krotoa, who shares that ancestral line, it is important for me to know who my ancestors are and to celebrate those ancestors.

As South Africans, Krotoa represents a cement. If we liken ourselves to different bricks in our diversity, she is the cement that binds these bricks into the wall we want to call a nation.

Krotoa has white descendants. Krotoa has black descendants. Krotoa has descendants who are labelled "coloured". We have something here in common to explore, to celebrate, to build upon.

If we use this cement as a nation we can be a strong wall. If we remain just bricks piled on top of each other this nation is going to fall apart.

You judge for yourself whether this was a vixen and a whore and a drunkard as some historians say. This woman was much, much more.

-Tariq Mellet, Hidden Histories, Krotoa Daughter of the Cape, SABC TV2, 9/6/2013

RE-MEMBERING KROTOA & AUTSHUMATO

by Deela Khan

http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/re-membering-krotoa-amp-autshumato

Divested of names and birthright

Autshumato and Krotoa were ferried

oor die see, oor die see, in die eiland stemertjie 

every time they incurred the wrath of their insatiable masters.

As island-prison you were too small to hold Autshumato

(considered to be the devil himself & called Harry die Strandloper)

whose nostrils retained the odour of the wild.

The irresistible allure of the ancestral spirit-land compelled him

to snatch a boat, brave the froth and blinding spray 

of vessel-snapping swells and with fellow Khoi-comrade row into 

Blaauwbergstrand, unspotted, dazed, but in one piece!

Swift as an air-slicing pestle, he was not re-captured

but his land had already slipped into Dutch hands.

Robbed of her Khoikhoi identity at eight 

Krotoa, pygmalioned into a Dutch girl,

was baptised and re-named Eva.

Subtly programmed to manipulate and betray

her people and to serve the Dutch East India Company

Krotoa became the most spirited traitor-diplomat of her time.

But when the Dutch had eventually grabbed all

her political use-value declined.

A sudden turn of the wheel of fortune made her service

at the Castle obsolete, put her master-mistress foster-parents

Jan & Maria Van Riebeeck on a ship to Holland and lured 

her husband, the respected Posthouder1, into a premature death.

Thus shaken awake she found no hooks to hold her

at the castle, but to what alternative place was she to trek

lugging her bewildered self and her young?

Estranged from Autshumato and her fast-disappearing

people, there remained no Khoikhoi kingdom

she could return to. Caught as she was between

two cultures, tottering on the rim of the Dutch world,

the Khoikhoi world, the Khoi-Dutch world,

she threw herself into a cask & hit the bottle hard

as she struggled to drown the niggling imagoes

of her Khoi-princess past.

Khoi princess Krotoa, wrapt in the glory

of her favourite skins, chattering away in musical clicks,

limbs oiled, vital and glowing, would only be seen as a smelly

inboorling, a Hotnot meid wholly and innately dangerous?

Never could she dream of reclaiming

her birthright, she had irretrievably

lost her natural identity?

The Company buried baptised Krotoa

away from her kindred spirit-soil. Thus

"earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

in sure and certain hope of the resurrection

to eternal life..." Eva, propped into a Dutch

coffin, was planted in a remote corner of the

Castle-fortress where she had served,

had loved & married, was widowed,

lost her children, lost her people,

her head, heart & carved-up soul?

-Extract from: Engaging the Shades of Robben Island, (Realities, 2002. pp.22-23)

See: 
http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/docs/16.2/17%20Narismulu%20F.PDF
http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2012/11/krotoa-our-mythic-go-between.html

Sources:
Hidden Histories, Krotoa Daughter of the Cape, SABC TV2
Deela Khan, 2002. Engaging the Shades of Robben Island. Realities.
Karel Schoeman, 2009. Seven Khoi Lives. Cape Biographies of the Seventeenth Century. Pretoria: Protea.
Dan Sleigh, 1938, Eilande, recently translated from Afrikaans by Andre Brink (in Dutch: 'Stemmen uit zee'/in English: 'Islands').

Internet Resources:
http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/krotoa.htm
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/69.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotoa
http://ancestry24.com/eva-krotoa-van-die-kaap/
http://www.geni.com/people/Krotoa-Eva-van-die-Kaap/
http://www.southafrica.to/history/history.html


©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Krotoa - Our Mythic Go-Between

There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call the terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come.

Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, p.86-87

Recently, the South African Post Office, issued a postage stamp portraying a young Khoikhoi woman named Krotoa, also known as Eva to the Dutch. Krotoa became an important figure in South African history. The recognition of Krotoa on one of our postage stamps was of considerable import to me personally as it must have been for many others.

Krotoa was a 9th great grandmother of mine and as such I have a special affinity with her. Indeed she is "mother" of countless South Africans of many races. Through her we are all connected. She embodies and reflects in many ways the "shattered mythic" essence of the South African psyche. Her story is our story.

The stamp, "designed by Lien Botha, features a drawing from the Western Cape Archives portraying Krotoa and a VOC (the Dutch East India Company) ship from a painting by Aernhout Smit (1683). These images are superimposed onto a contemporary photograph taken at Milnerton beach with Table Mountain in the background. The Commemorative folder cover also features the face of Krotoa, this time encircled by a wreath of tulips which alludes to the Company's Garden" (1,2)

Krotoa is probably the most written about woman in South African history. The Post Office Souvenir Folder (3) gives us a tantalising glimpse into the life of this remarkable but enigmatic young woman...

Krotoa was born in about 1642 on Robben Island, a decade before the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. She was the first Khoikhoi woman to appear in the European records of the early settlement at the Cape as an individual personality who interacted socially and culturally with the Dutch settlers. 

Krotoa's brother-in-law is said to have been Oudasoa, a chief of the Cochoquas. When she was young, she worked in the household of Jan van Riebeeck, the first governor of the Cape Colony. 

As a teenager, Krotoa learned Dutch and Portuguese and like her uncle, Autshumao (known as Harry or Herrie by the Dutch) - a Coringhaicona Khoikhoi leader and trader, she worked as an interpreter for the Dutch who wanted to trade goods for cattle. Krotoa's role as interpreter extended beyond trading, as she was also instrumental in negotiating with the 'Peninsulars', whose foreman was Doman, regarding conflicts around land that erupted into formal war in 1659.

Since Krotoa travelled frequently between the Dutch colony and the Cochoquas, she came to embody the notion of an in-between figure, but found little happiness in either community. On 3 May 1662, she was baptised into the Christian religion by a visiting parson, Petrus Sibelius, in the church inside the Fort de Goede Hoop. 

On 26 April 1664, she married Pieter van Meerhoff, a Danish surgeon. She was the first Khoikhoi to marry according to Christian customs, and this marriage is the first between a European and a Khoi at the Cape. In May 1665, the couple left the Cape for Robben Island where Van Meerhoff became superintendent. He died on 27 February 1668 on an expedition to Madagascar. 

On 30 September 1668 she returned to the mainland with her children. According to VOC reports, she was suffering from alcoholism and left the Castle in the settlement to be with her family. In February 1669, she was imprisoned at the Castle and then banished to Robben Island for disorderly conduct. She returned to the mainland on many occasions just to find herself once more banished to Robben Island. Three of her children survived infancy. She died on 29 July 1674 at the Cape and was buried on 30 September 1674 in the church at the Fort.
Krotoa's eldest daughter, Pieternella, married Daniel Zaaijman, a friend of Van Riebeeck's. 

They lived in Madagascar for a while, but returned to the Cape upon the departure of the VOC from the island. Because of Pieternella's documented descendants, Krotoa is regarded a significant ancestor for many South Africans across various races.

Krotoa is described as an "in-between figure" reminding me of Brighid of the Celts (4).

Like Brighid, Krotoa is the 'Lady of the Shores'. She greets the European settlers as they come ashore. The shore is one of those magical in-between places that so fascinated the Celts and certainly the Strandlopers of the Cape. These in-between places, sometimes called "thin places", such as shorelines, fountains, wells, mountain passes, doorways and so on, are go-betweens, corridors. The shore is neither dry land, nor is it the ocean, yet it is the meeting place of both. In Krotoa, Africa and Europe meets. If we consider that the land represents our solid, material world, while the sea represents the Great Cosmic womb of all life, the intuitive side of our nature, we can see that the shore is a meeting place between one world and another and a young Khoikoi girl the bridge between Black and White South Africans.

oOo

Relationship Chart

Krotoa (Eva vd Kaap) - Colin Garvie

Acknowledgements:
1. Botha's interpretation of Krotoa was derived from; Sketches representing the Native Tribes, Animals and Scenery of Southern Africa, from drawings made by the late Mr Samuel Daniell, engraved by William Daniell, London, 1820, Courtesy of Western Cape Archives and Records Service - M1052 (photograph) and J 741 DAN (publication).
2. William Fehr Collection, Iziko Museums, Cape Town - ship from Aernout Smit painting of Cape Town, 1683. Carine Zaayman, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
3. Setempe, South African Stamp News, Vol.17, No.3, September - December 2012.
4. Wendy M. Reynolds, The Goddess Brighid, http://www.millersv.edu/~english/homepage/duncan/medfem/bride.html

Sources:
Karel Schoeman, 2009. Seven Khoi Lives. Cape Biographies of the Seventeenth Century. Pretoria: Protea.
Dan Sleigh, 1938, Eilande, recently translated from Afrikaans by Andre Brink (in Dutch: 'Stemmen uit zee'/in English: 'Islands').
SA Philatelic Services, Customer Services: http://www.postoffice.co.za, http://www.virtualpostoffice.co.za

Internet Resources:
http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/krotoa.htm
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/69.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotoa
http://ancestry24.com/eva-krotoa-van-die-kaap/
http://www.geni.com/people/Krotoa-Eva-van-die-Kaap/
http://www.southafrica.to/history/history.html



©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

11th Great-Grandson of a Khoi-Strandloper

Today her documented legacy lives on, as paradoxically as her life, in at least three million previously classified ‘white’ descendants of her daughter, Pieternella, who married Dutch farmer Daniel Zaaiman. According to lineages provided by genealogist Keith Meintjes, these descendants include former premiers Paul Kruger, Jan Smuts and FW de Klerk.

-Sharon Marshall

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Thoughts of a Confused "Boer"

I asserted my independence outside of the pulpit and the congregation to exercise the full rights of citizenship, to use my voice as well as my vote for what I believed to be the better policy. I incurred still greater displeasure as a pro-Boer.

-AE Garvie, Scottish Theologian, 1899

Boer leader and philosopher, Jannie Smuts, once said:
"There is a crack that runs through the universe and that crack runs through me!"

I'm not sure what he originally meant by that but I suspect he was speaking about our fractured natures.

By some strange coincidence I may have inherited something of a broken Boer trait too. Though of Scottish-German descent providence has wrapped me around with the Boer character. I have previously written about my interest in genealogy and family history. For some inexplicable reason my lot has repeatedly been linked with that of the Boers. Two stories come to mind.

The first from my father's line, is a reference from Richard Meinertzhagen's  Kenya Diary (1902-1906). The Garvies of Kenya, including my grandfather, were granted certain land rights in Nandi territory, Western Kenya. This didn't impress Capt. Richard Meinertzhagen of the King's African Rifles. The Anglo-Boer War was still fresh in the minds of the British. To some, Boers were a despicable breed. No matter the fact that the Garvies weren't Boers but Scots, never mind that these very Garvies served British regiments back in the Transvaal Republic as Laurance Garvie put it, "I have had five sons all through the Campaign fighting the Battles for their King and Country...I have been two years and four months exiled from my home" to Meinertzhagen the Garvies were Boers to be spurned.

On the 13th April 1905 Meinetzhagen recorded: "The only European settlers in the whole of the Nandi country are two Boer families called Garvie and Steyn. They have recently come from the Transvaal and are related to the ex-President of the Orange Free State. They all seem terrified of the Nandi and have been applying for a guard of my men... After the guard had started Garvie came to see me and told me I could not now have the room I had chosen but could have another one, which was not suitable. I told him he must abide by my first choice or not have the guard. He said he would sooner have the guard, so I did not recall it. But this afternoon the guard returned with the report that the room had been changed and that they had been put in with the pigs. So I withdrew the guard. These Boers are indeed slippery customers." Donald Sutherland Garvie's grave sin appears to be that he had fallen in love and married a Boer girl, Cornelia Steyn! I am happy to say that once the facts became known, Meinertzhagen and the Garvies seemed to have gotten on famously.

The second story, from my mother's line, is detailed in Albert Blake's Boereverraaier (Boer Traitor). A chapter is devoted to how my second great-grandfather, Oupa Frederick Koch was shot by the Boers in a skirmish during the Boer War near Wakkerstroom. His son, Hendrik was executed by firing squad having being found guilty of treason by a tribunal set up by Chris Botha, the brother of Louis Botha. The family were branded "Verraaiers, Traitors" and ostracised. However the historical record suggests that the tragic event was a horrible miscarriage of justice. Frederick Koch's gravestone reads, "Shot by L.Badenhorst and his men at Roodepoort although innocent."

Do I now forever harbour resentments because both Brit and Boer judged us harshly? On the contrary, tragic and unjustified as these incidents might have been, I draw inspiration that rather than being worthless farmers or traitors my forebears were in fact pioneers and reconcilers to be honoured and admired. History is riddled with ironies. Donald Sutherland Garvie introduced “bioscope” to Kenya. A Nairobi newspaper obituary reported that Donald was "formerly the leading spirit of the newspaper the ADVERTISER... He belonged to the quiet and unostentatious sphere of true gentility". The Magistrate of Wakkerstroom wrote, "The late Mr. Koch was a Burgher of considerable influence and standing in the neighbourhood and when he saw that the cause of the Boers had failed he and his whole family surrendered and... he did everything in his power to assist the British in bringing the war to a conclusion."

I am this strange confluence of prejudice and bitterness but more. When I despair, when I feel misunderstood, negated, broken, fractured, and hard done by my colleagues and compatriots, I remind myself of my two Boer stories and realise there is always another story yet to be told. A crack may well run through us as Smuts asserts, but cracks can also be redemptive breakthroughs. Vladimir Nabokov said, "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." I'm beginning to see through my cracks now!

For further reading:
Errol Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers
Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary (1902-1906)
Albert Grundlingh, The Dynamics of Treason: Boer Collaboration in the South African War of 1899-1902

Albert Blake, Boereverraaier, Tafelberg, 2010
Piet Beukes, The holistic Smuts: A study in personality
Alfred Ernest Garvie, Memories and meanings of my life,



©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za/

Deep Genealogy, DNA, and Ancient Celtic Histories

The Storms River Mouth Cave was very likely one of the shoreline abodes of some of my ancient stone age ancestors. Though I had never been there before, it was a very familiar place, a place of epiphanies like Elijah's cave. My roots in Africa are very real. It is equally real on other distant shores: Scotland, Ireland, going back even to the Black Sea! Once, sitting on a beach on Mull looking across to the sacred island Iona in the Hebrides there were the same familiar feelings that "this was home".

The reason for this excursion deep into my own personal history is simple. Calvin Miller in The Path of Celtic Prayer expresses it well, "I wanted to find the flame again. For it is sometimes by looking at the past that the present amends its dead soul, and there is a chance that the future is born with new vitality." (p.6)

To confirm these connections, I arranged a Y-Chromosome DNA analysis tracking my paternal line down time and back some 30,000 years into my own misty antiquity. The results were intriguing. This was a far deeper cave...

"Haplogroup R is defined by a DNA marker known as M207. Everyone who carries this marker today descends from a common paternal ancestor who lived about 30,000 years ago in west Asia. To date, over thirty subclades of haplogroup R have been identified, of which, R1a1-M17 and R1b1b2-M269 (historically called R1b3) are the most well described. Both of these subgroups are indicators of European ancestry with haplogroup R1a1-M17 most representative of Eastern Europeans and R1b1b2-M269 most characteristic of Western Europeans.

"R1b1b2-M269 is found at very high frequencies (50-80%) throughout western Europe particularly in the Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, Portugal, France, Germany, and northern Italy, with diminishing frequencies towards the east although representation stretches as far as central Asia and India." (Genetree CGG Report)

R1b1b2 Celts is thought to have arrived in central and western Europe around 2300 BCE, by going up the Danube from the Black Sea coast. The migration must have been on a massive scale, maybe due to pressure from other Indo-European people from the north. There might have been several consecutive waves across the Black Sea to the Danube, but the largest one between 2500 BCE and 2300 BCE. From there they moved in Britain. http://www.eupedia.com/europe/origins_haplogroups_europe.shtml#R1b-subclades

That is genetic history and it is pretty technical but the romantic in me warms more to the stories of the bard, storyteller, and ancient historian. For instance, William Livingston writes in his 1850 Vindication of the Celtic Character ...

"The Celtic race were the first known inhabitants of Europe, which was occupied throughout by various tribes or clans. The appropriate name which this remarkable race gave themselves was Celtae; but the terms Galatae, Galatians and Galli, were appellations by which in later ages they were usually distinguished. They covered all Europe to the western extremities. The Keltoi inhabited to the farthest west. The Cymrig Gauls carried their arms along the Danube, Illyricum and Dalmatia. They took possession of the Alps, and colonized the whole north of Italy."

Livingston describes their spread across Europe challenging the Greek and Roman empires. He then links them, with reference to Josephus, to Biblical genealogy...

"Gomer was the father of the Gomarians who are now called by the Greeks, Gauls. Filii autem Japhet septem numerantur ex quo Galatae id est Galli.... Gomer, the eldest son of Japheth, and the father of the Gomarians, who anciently inhabited Galatia, Phrygia, &c. &c., either by the east end of the Euxine, or by crossing the Hellespont, penetrated into Europe, and peopled the countries now called Poland, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Scandinavia. Gomer's sons settled themselves in Spain and Italy as early as 142 years after the flood.... they were contemporaries of Abraham and his father Terah.... Here is antiquity for you, equal to that of the ancient patriarchs. Nor do the ancient Scots or Irish appear of a different original. The Phoenicians, another branch of the Celts, inhabited the coast of the Red Sea."

Modern historians may well attribute much of that to fable, legend, mythology, and the imagination and yet there is a strange concurrence with the DNA record. White South Africans are acutely aware of how Genesis 10 and Josephus Bk 1, Ch 6 came to be misapplied to under gird our dubious racist doctrines. Discovering that I was also of Khoikhoi descent was a helpful corrective to any presumed supremest attitudes I might have entertained. Just as the Zulu and the Lemba take pride in their ancient traditions so I find my own origins both humbling and enriching.

Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream puts such romance down to fantasy and imagination...

I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
      - William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", V, I, 4-17

To which, with Hippolyta, I reply and point to a reality and a Joy far beyond the superficial joy of our sometimes mundane world:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigur'd so together.

...for I'm a romantic at heart. Caves and DNA, Celts and Khoikhoi fire the imagination, transfigures the mind.

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

"The Clock is Ticking!" Liberation Treatment - Hope for MS Sufferers

The thrill of genealogy, especially that branch of genealogy known as "One Name Studies", is that one frequently comes across stories of hope and inspiration. This week one such story broke in the course of my "Garvie One Name Studies" (GONS).

It is the story about Steve Garvie of Canada and the controversial new treatment for Multiple Sclerosis called Liberation Treatment or "blocked vein therapy" developed by Italy's Dr. Paolo Zamboni. It involves a relatively simple procedure to open a blocked vein from the brain. This is a story of a man set free from his limitations with the hope that others might be liberated too. (Photo Credit: The Globe and Mail)

Ten years ago Steve Garvie was diagnosed with secondary progressive MS. He had heard of Liberation Treatment. "The clock is ticking. People die. People with MS commit suicide at an alarming rate. There is no hope. So why don't we give them hope?" he wondered. So he approached vascular surgeon Dr. Sandy McDonald, who runs a clinic in Barrie, Ontario.

Steve says as soon as the vein was opened, he immediately felt warmth in the left side of his face and he could wiggle his toes.

"One of the nurses came over and said ‘Are you alright?' I said, ‘Yes, shake my hand.' She shook my left hand which was useless before," remembers Garvie.

 "It was quite remarkable," remembers McDonald.

Much research still needs to be done on the procedure but there is hope. Steve wouldn't call it a cure but "I am about 75 per cent better than I was before," he says.

He now has "energy to burn", reports the Globe and Mail.

Ordinary people can make a difference the minute we realise that "the clock is ticking". I sense Steve Garvie's story is a parable too!

For more read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Zamboni
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ms-patient-says-he-has-energy-to-burn-after-experimental-procedure/article1533739/
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2010/04/liberation-war.html


















©Colin G Garvie
HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Why do genealogy?

I am often asked that. "Why do you do genealogy?" There are two reasons why I do...

Firstly, to appreciate from whence I have come, the incredible past of those who came before me. This is beautifully expressed by Bill Bryson in his A Short History of Nearly Everything:

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly - in you.

Secondly, that I might dream of hitherto unimagined destinations, the amazing future that awaits those who come after me. H.G.Wells in The Discovery of the Future, says:

Out of our... lineage, minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.

                                                                                                                                  
So I am into genealogy because my ancestors are just the most amazing people who overcame great obstacles in life and by doing so are responsible for my being. I want to know who they are and what they overcame so I can better appreciate who I am. I am also into genealogy because of the breathtaking vistas and destinies that await my descendants. I want to anticipate who they will be and the challenges they will face so I can better live my life now.

Somewhere John Wesley wrote, "I have thought, I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God: just hovering over the great gulf; till a few moments hence, I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity!"

That is what genealogy does for me. It evokes spiritual wonder!








See also: Garvie Genealogy