Priorities and progress - hatches, matches and dispatches.

[William Douglas]

As many already know, my current priority for research is often dictated by the most recent request for assistance with a family tree. However, my current work is correcting a Douglas branch that I had thought had died out.

I received a message from the great great grand-daughter of Sir Robert Andrews Douglas 3rd bart.of Glenbervie, proving that he did indeed have a family, and so I re-visited this family in the Douglas Archives. It is clearly marked as work in progress, and evidence of my failure to complete one task before moving on to another. However, it is all work worth doing and there are some interesting personalities in this distinguished family, whose biographies I have yet to compile. Any help would be well received!

You can read more about the Douglases of Glenbervie on the updated, but still incomplete, page.

There have been a number of family events that have had me working through the genealogy database. I have had no births notified, but there have been some engagements, marriages and deaths to record. These will all appear when I next upload the revised database. As this takes the best part of a day to complete, I only do it very few weeks.

Notable events have included the death of the Duke of Hamilton (my 6th cousin), Sir Ashley Ponsonby (2nd cousin, once removed), and the marriage of the 18th Earl of Pembroke (5th cousin, 3 times removed). These may seem fairly remote, but when entering their details into the database, it helps tie together threads that have been lying separately. I also recorded the death of Lord Laing of Dunphail.

He had married a Laurie, and I was mindful of the connection through Annie Laurie, one of the anecdotes of our family history that I enjoy. Lord laing's connection with the Douglases has yet to be found!.

Albert, Crown Prince of Monaco, announced his engagement last week. He is descended from Mary Victoria Douglas-Hamilton, daughter of the 11th Duke of Hamilton. This prompted me to update this branch of our tree. It brought to light some glaring gaps, and this was one of the areas of the database that I had not rebuilt following a catastrophic failure a few years ago when much of the data disappeared into the ether.

So, those of you who thought I have been delving into your ancestors, maybe a little prompt might help?