While I have only ever had one dog with a pedigree, a female German Shepherd we named Senorita, all my furry friends have come to me with no family history. But I know a substantial amount of information on my family history, albeit mainly through my mother’s family line. You see, most of the male side of my family, father’s and mother’s, died in their 50’s and 60’s before I was in my hunt for pedigree.
Merchants, industrialists, printers and blacksmiths; scholars, sailors and surgeons; and even one criminal Scotsman hanged for a drunken murder. I loved to research my family heritage; everything I had was written om scraps of paper until the digitizing of information in the last fifteen years. A recent trip to Ireland tied loose associations and peeled the onion farther back into Scotland and England.
One thing I have noted: while my direct line through the male members carried on for several centuries until the late 1890s, daughters and not sons pass scottish genes down to me. Some boys were lost to war; others to unforgiving diseases. Yet through my maternal great-grandfather, tons of family I found through the internet have prospered . One thing is certain – there are hundreds if not thousands of Scottish descendents through my genealogy search from the 1500s. Not much else to do on those cold nights in drafty homes on the Scottish coast?
Maybe that is why I favor mutts so much. What else could you call me? -I’m a Polish/ Irish/Scottish Sea-Dog.
It's a Dog's Life 