Chris Paton - Sharing Your Family History Online: A Guide for Family Historians

S HARING YOUR F AMILY H ISTORY O NLINE

Birth, Marriage & Death Records

The Family History Web Directory

Tracing British Battalions on the Somme

Tracing Great War Ancestors

Tracing History Through Title Deeds

Tracing Secret Service Ancestors

Tracing the Rifle Volunteers

Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors from 1066 to 1837

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Death Records Second Edition

Tracing Your Ancestors through Family Photographs

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Letters and Personal Writings

Tracing Your Ancestors Using DNA

Tracing Your Ancestors Using the Census

Tracing Your Ancestors: Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk

Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors

Tracing Your Army Ancestors

Tracing Your Army Ancestors Third Edition

Tracing Your Birmingham Ancestors

Tracing Your Black Country Ancestors

Tracing Your Boer War Ancestors

Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors

Tracing Your Canal Ancestors

Tracing Your Channel Islands Ancestors

Tracing Your Church of England Ancestors

Tracing Your Criminal Ancestors

Tracing Your Docker Ancestors

Tracing Your East Anglian Ancestors

Tracing Your East End Ancestors

Tracing Your Family History on the Internet

Tracing Your Female Ancestors

Tracing Your First World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Freemason, Friendly Society and Trade Union Ancestors

Tracing Your Georgian Ancestors, 17141837

Tracing Your Glasgow Ancestors

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Gallipoli Campaign

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Somme

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: Ypres

Tracing Your Huguenot Ancestors

Tracing Your Insolvent Ancestors

Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors Second Edition

Tracing Your Labour Movement Ancestors

Tracing Your Legal Ancestors

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors Second Edition

Tracing Your London Ancestors

Tracing Your Medical Ancestors

Tracing Your Merchant Navy Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Irish Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Irish Ancestors Second Edition

Tracing Your Oxfordshire Ancestors

Tracing Your Pauper Ancestors

Tracing Your Police Ancestors

Tracing Your Potteries Ancestors

Tracing Your Pre-Victorian Ancestors

Tracing Your Prisoner of War Ancestors: The First World War

Tracing Your Railway Ancestors

Tracing Your Roman Catholic Ancestors

Tracing Your Royal Marine Ancestors

Tracing Your Rural Ancestors

Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records

Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors

Tracing Your Second World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Servant Ancestors

Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors

Tracing Your Shipbuilding Ancestors

Tracing Your Tank Ancestors

Tracing Your Textile Ancestors

Tracing Your Twentieth-Century Ancestors

Tracing Your Welsh Ancestors

Tracing Your West Country Ancestors

Tracing Your Yorkshire Ancestors

Writing Your Family History

Your Irish Ancestors

A Guide for Family Historians

CHRIS PATON

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

PEN AND SWORD FAMILY HISTORY

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Chris Paton 2021

ISBN 978 1 52678 029 4

ePUB ISBN 978 1 52678 030 0

Mobi ISBN 978 1 5267 8031 7

The right of Chris Paton to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Pen & Sword Books Limited incorporates the imprints of Atlas, Archaeology, Aviation, Discovery, Family History, Fiction, History, Maritime, Military, Military Classics, Politics, Select, Transport, True Crime, Air World, Frontline Publishing, Leo Cooper, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing, The Praetorian Press, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe Transport, Wharncliffe True Crime and White Owl.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail:

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Or

PEN AND SWORD BOOKS

1950 Lawrence Rd, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

E-mail:

Website: www.penandswordbooks.com

I t is twenty years since I first started to research my family history as a Northern Irish born resident of Scotland. In that time I have uncovered many extraordinary ancestral stories, ranging from the absolutely hilarious to the downright tragic.

Although I commenced my research in early 2000, my ancestral background was something that I had always been curious about as a child, not least because we were the only Patons in the Northern Irish phone book. I once asked my father Who are the Patons? and received the wonderfully exotic response that my grandfather Charles had been evacuated from Belgium just prior to the First World War; we must therefore have been Belgian. The whole story was somewhat vague, however, in that my grandparents had separated when my father was very young, with my Scottish-born grandmother subsequently raising her children in the County Antrim town of Carrickfergus.

Most of what my father knew about our family came from my grandmother, who had sadly long since passed away by the time I decided to take a look, but what he had been told was extremely limited. He did not know if he had any aunts and uncles, for example, nor whether he had any cousins on the Paton side. Once I started to investigate I soon discovered that my grandfather Charles did indeed have a Belgian connection, with his parents marriage record from 1889 in Glasgow noting that my great-grandfather David Hepburn Paton was resident in Brussels at that point. However, David was originally from Blackford in Perthshire, whilst his wife Jessie hailed from Inverness.

In pursuing the story of David, his siblings and their descendants, I soon made some relevant breakthroughs. I discovered from a second cousin in Perthshire that she had old photographs of her family on holiday with a Paton cousin called Brussels Johnny, and not long after this I located a couple of surviving first cousins of my father in Glasgow and London. Upon meeting them, the floodgates and the photo albums opened. It transpired that my great-grandfather David had moved to Brussels to run a couple of shoe shops in the Belgian capital for a Glaswegian firm called R. & J. Dicks, which made footwear from a resin called guttapercha (from which the Scots word gutties originated for synthetic rubber shoes).