Interview: Director Chris Lawson (Business and Plans)

Genealogy, I wouldn’t say, is an easy thing to start if you’re starting from scratch in a far flung place like this, because you need records. And that was something we didn’t have. When we started, if we needed extra information, down we went to Edinburgh, and that can be costly, and also takes up a lot of time. And, but, but the thing is, the beauty of our business was that my husband had collected a huge amount of information on island people. When he came up here first of all he became very aware of oral tradition and how strong it was. And it wasn’t something he’d ever been aware of – people carrying this information in their heads – so he started writing it down. And that became really the basis of the resource that we now have. He, he blended in the written records later on, but really at the heart of it is the oral tradition that he gathered from many – many many of these people are now dead, uh, in the islands here and overseas. When, when, you know, when we went overseas we caught a lot of, uh, oral tradition in the Gaelic-speaking communities. And because of that it has been easier for us. I won’t say it’s been dead easy. It’s been easier, but it wouldn’t be an easy, uh, thing to set up, I don’t think, as a business as far away from centres like Edinburgh.

I would say that, that probably the fact that Bill had those records – that’s the crucial thing. What he gathered as a youngster going round the islands, and the interest he had – he was, he was very lucky in that Taransay, islands like Taransay and Scarp still had populations when he came here. And he also met a lot of the old St Kildans living on the mainland, and he got a lot of information from these people.

Now, we, we became very aware that people in Cape Breton as well – and also in some of the written records in Cape, Cape Breton – information exists there that doesn’t, that is unknown in Scotland. And that – he was, he was very very fortunate to be able to pick up on that and blend it into the records. So when these people come from overseas to us we can very often fit them in to families, which may not have been possible if we just depended on the civil registers.

Um, at the moment we, uh, Bill has just written an online genealogy course for UHI (“University of the Highlands and Islands”), which is going to be offered, hopefully, at the end, towards the end of the year, maybe as soon as the term starts in the autumn. The new term starts. Uh, that has been a very exciting thing because he, he wrote the English part of it. I translated it, and I must say I learnt an awful lot, just going through all this. There, uh, there are two – there’ll be two modules on offer.

Um, that’s been very exciting, doing that. It’s a new concept, you know, delivering this over, through the internet. But, um, at the same time we’ve started on a plan to put all the genealogy records we have online. And that’s going to take a couple of years, but the first – we’re into the first part of that project now, having secured some funding just in the last week or two, eh, from Comann na Gàidhlig, and HIE (Highlands and Islands Enterprise) are also getting involved in that. And, uh, we’re going to put – initially we’re going to – we finished a three-year emigration project in December of last year, and we’re putting twenty two – the index to twenty two thousand records online for, uh, people who emigrated from the islands. Now, once that is done we’ll, we’ll take that further and we’ve got a quarter of a million records for islanders and we’ll put an index to that online as well. And that’ll be offered, eh, for just anybody – can come and buy maybe a line or two lines, or build up their family history through it. So, uh, it’s going to take about, probably, two years to complete this, but that’s what we’re working on at the moment. There’s never an end to it, you could say. And, uh, once that’s done, who knows?

Uh, the other thing that Bill’s done is, having started writing books, he’s now reached book number 58. And there’s any amount of material – as long as his, uh, mental abilities keep going, we’ll keep publishing.