Scotland and Dalmally, A Real Family Connection 3

Today was quite an experience !

We certainly cram some long days into our travels on occasions – we started this morning before 4am as we had to drop the car at the airport in Keflavik and say our goodbyes to Jatta and Simon – for now ! It was also goodbye to Iceland and off to our next LAND – Scotland.

Landing at Glasgow Airport, we collected our car and set off northwest, with Dalmally as our destination.

Dalmally is where my “Scottish roots” go back to – my “Anderson” great grandfather left his family there in the 1850’s to come to Australia. And my grandfather, somewhat unexpectedly, visited his aunts, uncles and cousins there some 60 years later when he was on leave from the fighting in France during WWI.

But that’s just an outline of the day …….

Our morning started with the alarm at 3.50 am – and we were soon heading to the airport for car drop-off and check in for our 7.30am flights.
After saying our temporary goodbyes to Simon & Jatta, we were soon on our plane and headed for Glasgow and the next part of our tour. The weather forecast was fairly clear – 100% rain – and it was not wrong ! We touched down on time – just before 11am local time in Scotland – collected our car (a Dacia Duster – a sort of small SUV looking thing, very basic) and started off toward our stop for the night in Dalmally.

Dalmally is my “ancestoral home” on the Anderson side – well at least as far as I can trace back (late 1700’s) and the place from where my great grandfather, Peter Anderson, left to emigrate to Australia in the 1850’s. We had visited Dalmally on a tour in 2007 however I had little “ancestry” information at that stage and it was a pretty wet and miserable day. At least the “wet and miserable day” part hadn’t changed.
But a lot else has since and today turned out to be an unbelievably memorable one for me ! – more on that shortly….

We drove north from Glasgow, along Loch Lomond – or what we could see of it in the mist and rain – and our first stop was the little village of Luss. It had been established  to house the workforce of nearby slate quarries and the tiny houses of the town today have been beautifully maintained – it is now a conservation village. Even in the rain it was a very nice little town. We wandered down to the loch, walked along to the pier, back through the village, bought sandwiches and coffee at the village store for our lunch and then started off again.

The pier at Luss, on Loch Lomond

As we moved further north, we drove through Inveraray – the castle being famous as the seat of the Dukes of Argyll, chiefs of Clan Campbell, since the 18th century. Despite the weather, being a Sunday there was plenty of traffic around.

Inverary ahead …

A bit bleak !

And getting bleaker !

Next stop was quite near to Dalmally – Kilchurn Castle on the banks of Loch Awe. A now ruined castle, the weather somewhat suited the gray castle and the mist and mountains added to the scene. We managed to get a bit of a break in the weather and decided to park and walk along the bank of the Loch out to the castle. Of course it started to rain as we got there however it was well worth the stop.

At Kilchurn Castle

From here it was time for me to start my search around Dalmally. As I started above, I had found quite a bit more information about the family since our visit in 2007. And I had a photograph of my mother and father standing outside a house in Dalmally which was “the family home”. As Dalmally is just a small village, I managed to actually find this house by doing a “street view walk” through Dalmally on Google Maps !

Then the story gets interesting ! Earlier in the year, I found a website link to the Dalmally Historical Association – very basic and really just a bit of information about them with a contact email address. So I decided to send an email just on the off chance they may have some information. When my Dad visited in 1990, he had seen some photos of his father in a photo album at the local gift shop – his father, Emerson Anderson – Peter’s son – had visited Dalmally in 1918 when on leave from France in WWI – so I thought they might know the whereabouts of this photo album.

Well, fairly quickly I got an email response from the lady who was the archivist for the Association – Jess Dinning. Jess knew about these photos – which were actually postcards – and was very excited as the Association had been doing a project on WWI – back in 2014 – to coincide with the 100 year anniversary of the war and had been intrigued by the name – Emerson Anderson – and the context of the postcards.
We swapped a lot of information and copies of what the Association had and Jess told me that my contact had stirred up a lot of interest from the within the Association because of their own interest in who “Emerson” was. As we got closer to our tour, I enquired whether we could meet during our short time in Dalmally, to look at what they had. Jess advised that the Association had decided that the originals of these documents – 100 years old now – should come back to the family so a meeting was arranged.
We invited Jess and her husband John to join us for dinner at a local restaurant as a thankyou for all the information she had been able to provide. However, Jess wanted us to join them at their home – she said they had a local resident who had worked for the local butcher in Dalmally – that butcher would have been my great uncle ! So we happily agreed.

During the afternoon when we arrived in Dalmally, armed with information Jess had been able to provide, we visited the old cemetery in the local churchyard and found the grave stone of a number of family members – people my grandfather Emerson had seen during his visits on leave. We also found 3 properties these people lived in during their life – one as the local Postmaster, another as the local Butcher and another as the local Reverend of the church.

Searching for the family headstones in Glenorchy churchyard, Dalmally

At 6pm we were collected at our B&B, Craig Villa Guesthouse, by Jess’s husband John and driven the short distance to their home. As we thanked John for the invitation to dinner, he mentioned that “some of the others” coming had arrived and the rest would be there shortly – “what was happening”, I wondered, who were all these “others” !
It turned out to be just the most wonderful evening !!

There were 10 people connected to the historical association plus Adrienne and I. As it turned out, all of these people had taken a curious interest in my grandfather, Emerson. Even before my email earlier in the year, from the postcard Emerson had sent back to Dalmally – a picture of himself in uniform – back in 2014 with the start of the 100 year anniversary rememberances, the Association had tried to piece together the story of his postcard – “Dear Mary Ann – just a card to let you see I have not forgotten you” – of this Aussie soldier who had travelled so far and this local girl from Dalmally. They had created their own research – amongst other things, even to the photographer who had taken the photo of Emerson in France – then his ultimate return home many months after the end of the war – what had happened to delay him ?
The story I was able to fill in for them was that Emerson was visiting his uncle, John Anderson, who was the Dalmally Postmaster. One of his daughters, was Mary Ann – Emerson’s cousin, who worked in the post office with her sister Isabella. Mary Ann was in fact married to a postman, Archie Cameron, and Mary Ann’s brother, John, was the Dalmally butcher. John “the Postmaster” had a brother, Archie, who was a minister with the Church of Scotland and who lived in the house my mother and father were photographed in front of all those years ago. Emerson’s delay home was a result of him contracting the flu at the end of the war – the epidemic which swept through Europe – and which delayed his trip home due to his ill health.

They showed us the little presentation they had prepared for themselves and explained how excited they were to now be able to fill in the gaps. The Association President, Janet, then presented us with all the original postcards and photos they had from 1918 and 1919, sent by Emerson back to Dalmally. We all then had a group photo – the local “Oban Times” were very interested in the story and wanted to put it in the local paper !

100 years ago, my grandfather made “headlines” in the Oban Times – “a splendid type of our colonial soldier” and “has made many friends in the Glen”. We made 10 wonderful friends in the Glen and who knows, we may make “Anderson” headlines in Dalmally again ! 😁

Despite the fact that we had been up since 4am, we had such a wonderful evening with this lovely group of people, who had been total strangers beforehand, who welcomed us so warmly into their lives – they told us stories of Dalmally, and the history of the area – Willie, who had worked for “John the Butcher” back in the early 1960’s, told us about his recollections of those years – John, whose family had lived in the same house in Dalmally for 150 years, told stories of how things had changed over that time. All the others – Janet, Ann – Jess’s “partner in crime” with the archives, Ann, Willie’s wife, Steve the “tech guru” and his wife Jenni, Billie, and our wonderful hosts, Jess and John gave us such an enjoyable evening of stories and laughter – an evening that I will remember with such fondness for the rest of my life !

It was after 10pm – and a nice single malt whisky ! – when we started to flag and John drove us back to Craig Villa. It had been such an incredible experience – all from an email I probably never even expected to get much of a response to ! I can’t thank Jess, John and everyone enough for their hospitality – we had such an enjoyable time !
Despite being so tired, I think I was awake half the night recounting these wonderful people and stories !
Tomorrow we move further north – now armed with much more local knowledge and a few tips and certainly with some remarkable memories of our short time in Dalmally !

Today’s Tour Trivia – John Smith, leader of the Labour Party in the UK 1992-1994 was born in Dalmally. He was Opposition leader to John Major and was succeeded by Tony Blair when he died of a heart attack in May 1994.