How it all Began

Two posts in an hour!  Are you going to keep this up?

Ha!  I often suffer from insomnia and when something (or someone) wakes me up at night, hours can pass before my brain finally disengages enough that I can get back to sleep.  I've done plenty of tossing and turning this month and decided to spend the extra hours thinking about starting a blog and what I could write.

What better place to start than the beginning?  (Don't worry: such logic will rarely dictate the timing of future posts.)  In the late 1970s, my paternal grandfather's cousin Bruce Lamont MacKenzie wrote a history of the M(a)cKenzie family as he knew it.  Bruce was the grandson of our immigrant ancestors, James P and Mary McKenzie, and combined the history he'd learned from his father and his father's many siblings with personal stories of later generations.  Bruce sent copies of his history to the extended M(a)cKenzie Clan across Canada.  It began:

To me, a lover of History, a steady succession of dates of births, marriages, and deaths with little color of the events of life is very monotonous.  Consequently, I, in my "History" may have overstepped the bounds of good taste.  However, in the following statements I would point out that, in the words of the legal profession, they are written "without prejudice".  It is written with great respect and love of the people concerned and I trust will be received in that same context.

As so often happens, one person's interpretation can differ greatly from someone else's, and this memoir led to disagreements and alternative written histories.  Aren't families fun?

In the early 80s my mother started to draw a family tree, based on Bruce's writing and on the responses it generated, trying to pin down names and dates - about which there were plenty of uncertainties - and plot out the basic structure.  She used a roll of shelf paper, unspooled across the basement floor, trying to find a way to accommodate all the McKenzies.  Letters were sent to the churches in tiny Aberdeenshire villages, and months would pass before a kind letter arrived from the local minister containing those few details he'd been able to find, or apologising for being unable to find anything at all.  She did manage to find out that our family had its origins in Kennethmont or Kinnethmont, and in nearby Clatt.  In these pre-Internet times (yes, there really was such a thing, kids!), research was slow and results, when they finally arrived, often were disappointing.  One day the tree was rolled up and put away.

Fast-forward to the spring of 1995 and we received an invitation to a McKenzie family reunion in Killarney, Manitoba.  I was nearing the end of my third year of university and would be living nearby, so added my name to the list of attendees.  The invitation co-incided with a visit to Winnipeg from my maternal grandmother's sister Dorothy from England.  My grandmother was already unwell, and the sisters knew that this would be the last time they saw each other.  I sat at the low table in the TV room while they went through a box of old photographs, recalling names, dates and events, and telling me the stories they could remember, while I pencilled the details onto the back of each photo, conscious of my grandmother's failing health and the history about to be lost.  I returned to my basement apartment in Brandon, my head filled with stories and no idea what to do next.

The McKenzie reunion invitation was on my desk.  It was addressed to the descendants of James P. & Mary McKenzie.  "P"?

I was decided.  I would start by finding out my great-great-great-grandfather's middle name.