A Mother Who Sailed Away

My next piece is a long one and a little closer to home (metaphorically, if not literally). It is about my granny Dina’s grandmother, Jeanie McLean and is the story of how (and perhaps why) she took all of her family from Scotland to New Zealand, except for her eldest daughter Mary (Dina’s mum). We are very lucky to have an audio recording of Mary talking with Dina and her son Martin about her life – something which inspired me to record my granny in a similar way. I have drawn on both of these recordings, amongst many other family and documentary sources, for this biography of Jeanie and there is a short extract from the recording of Mary included within the story. I have tried to remain relatively objective when describing what happened, but with only a first-hand account of one side of the story there may well be an element of bias. Although I got some information from Jeanie’s grandson Lyall years ago, I now regret not speaking more to him before his death in 2013. Perhaps one day I’ll unearth more details from my remaining distant cousins in New Zealand.

(From now on I will include a short intro like this in these blog posts and link to the full story on a separate page. Hopefully that will make the site a little less cluttered going forwards)