Mo shinnsearan

It was definitely a day for staying indoors - wet and windy. I could have got started in (re)sorting out the porch but instead I got entangled in my family tree.  

My latest project is exploring the lives of selected siblings of my direct ancestors from Seil (my great great grandmother whom I met, her mother and her grandfather were born there).  I'm interested in when family members left Seil, where they went to and also when children stopped learning Gaelic.  My great grandmother appears unusual in that she moved east to Dundee whereas most other family members who left Argyll moved south to Glasgow and Lanarkshire. 

Today I was focused on a great great grand aunt Margaret Livingston who married a slate quarrier Donald McColl from Appin. Margaret and one her daughters died on Belnahua in 1915 - the most remote of slate islands which become uninhabited during the first world war.  Her husband moved to Ballachulish where her two sons also settled. Her eldest daughter married and moved to Lanarkshire, another emigrated to Canada and I have lost trace of a fourth after the 1891 census when she was 11. Guess what I will be doing the rest of the evening ! 

Every month An Lochran run a writing competition for Gaelic learners.  The theme last month was on learning approaches/aids which you find useful.  I wrote a short piece of my experiences of using Ceitidh,  text-to-speech software for Gaelic. I was primarily prompted to do so to raise awareness of how this can be helpful for dyslexic learners and so was pleased to learn it had been published on their website. I also now know that the word dyslexic can be lenited if needs be :-)