Family Reunion

As I think I have mentioned before, some years ago Cathleen and I both  took DNA tests through the Ancestry.com website.  We were (and still are) putting together our family trees and it seemed an interesting, if probably not very significant, part of the process.

My result however led to this photograph which was taken  today in Troon (where I and my father both grew up) .  It is of Cathleen and I with my first half cousin , Bill Russell who lives in Florida, along with his partner Annette , Angie & Jill (two of his daughters , and therefore my half first cousins once removed) and Jill's daughter Kennedy (half first cousin twice removed).

The DNA result you get back from Ancestry  lists matches, and the second  closest one my list (the first was a known cousin on my mother's side) was a William Russell in Florida, of whom I had never heard .  I checked his family tree on Ancestry and quickly saw that his grandfather - another William Russell (and my middle name is William) - was my grandfather but we had different grandmothers.  His grandmother had died of TB in 1916 and our common grandfather had remarried within a few months, to the woman who was my grandmother .   

The extra photo shows that William Russell  and his second wife along with two of my aunts.

I emailed Bill through the website and very quickly he got in touch.  Equally   quickly we discovered that our fathers were indeed  half brothers, but neither had ever even talked about having such a relationship.  We had essentially reconnected a severed branch of the family tree.  

Bill's father had left Scotland in 1920 and never been in contact again.  He lived the rest of his life in America and Bill of course was born and brought up there.    They are the American Russells  (not the first though - my research found a more distant relative from Islay who is buried on the field at Gettysburg having been killed in the battle there . )

However Bill and I have been emailing regularly  since we discovered the family connection and today we met on the ancestral lands , so to speak.  He and his family are on their way to Rome to take a Mediterranean cruise and decided to stop off en route.  They are here for three days and we have taken a house in South Ayrshire as a base for us all to explore where  we came from, and to get to know each others.  

This blip is the starting point of all that   - taken on the shore in Troon, out by the Royal Troon Golf Club.