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No Longer Separated by Oceans and Centuries
The “Digging Up Dead Family World Tour,”
John and Pat Liddell’s
Conquest of Much of Civilization
Including Alva Scotland
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John and Pat Liddell's photos of Their "Digging Up Dead Family World Tour"
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July 2005
By Pat Liddell of Wellington Province, New Zealand
We are now world travelers--my husband John and I. Our whirlwind worldwide holiday this year covered parts of the United Kingdom, Australia and Costa Rica, but here I will write principally of the UK portion of our weeks of global gallivanting—the part I will describe here as the "Digging Up Dead Family World Tour”.
We were accompanied by John's mother Peg who recently celebrated her 87th birthday and has an armload of great-grandchildren we had to tear her away from to join us on this madcap adventure of ours. She has traveled extensively over the past 30 years, and we needed her along to fast-track us through Customs and Immigration because of her pre-booked wheelchair--a very handy accessory to have around when traveling with an aged person
Our first stop after leaving our homeland of New Zealand was to visit the bustling city of Sydney on the southeast coast of Australia so Peg could reacquaint herself with her paternal cousin Olive, who is also comfortably seasoning into her 80s. Olive and Peg had not seen each other for more than 35 years, and they spent a few wonderful days catching up on each other’s lives and poring over each other’s family photos.
(Ed. Note: New Zealand was once an administrative unit of Australia and as a result, many families became split up in 1907 when NZ became an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations. As a result, going to visit the family “Down Under” is often not just a easy Sunday afternoon drive but rather, involves considerable international travel.)
Our next stop on the trip north of Sydney was in Port Macquarie where we visited Jim Thompson, the son of Peg’s sister Jane Thompson. Jim is John's cousin who again we had not seen for more than 35 years – and again, we spent another few days of catching up, etc. For various we believed that relations between Jim Thompson’s and Peg’s family had become strained over time. It was good to re-establish our friendships and we greatly enjoyed each other’s company.
Now, we felt we were well-settled into our harnesses and could let the “Dead Family” part of our trip begin
We flew to the United Kingdom with a two-night stopover in Singapore to give the aging bodies time to readjust to the different time zones we were passing through.
On arrival at Heathrow Airport near London, we were transported to Cambridge where we took delivery of a campervan, or as Americans might know it, a Winnebago-type vehicle. We chose this mode of transport and accommodation to overcome the massive exchange rate difference between the NZ$ and the British Pound--3 to 1. To us this meant that a cup of coffee selling for 3 British Pounds was costing us the equivalent of NZ$12. But by using the campervan both as transportation and lodging, we could cater for ourselves more economically, and it would also mean we could more easily accommodate our party of three.
After making a quick visit to the south of England to visit one of Peg's daughters-in-law and her children (Heather Liddell and her sons Jamie and Robert Liddell), we made our way northward toward Scotland, only stopping to try to source the ancestors of Peg, whose maiden name is Maude.
This was a particularly fruitful part of our journey, for we discovered that the Maude surname had variously been spelt down through the ages as Maud, Mawde, Morde and even further back, took the form de Montalk--likely a Norman surname as things now appear to us.
Finally, we finally arrived in Scotland. We knew it must be Scotland, for it was raining.
You can depend on that--for it is a verity of life: Is it raining? Then, you must be in Scotland.
We settled our vehicle into a well-appointed campervan park in Alva and hooked up the TV to catch the latest news on the London Bombings. It turned out that the bombers had traveled to London from Yorkshire, quite close to where we had been just a few days before.
The next two days were spent exploring the general area of Clackmannon and Stirlingshire--including Bannockburn, the site in 1314 where Robert the Bruce triumphed over the English army. We also spent some time in the record archives of the Alva and Alloa libraries. (All of this is located in and around Edinburgh on the North Sea coast of Scotland.)
We simply didn’t budget enough time for the libraries and we had to cut our research all too short, but we did manage to find the record of the baptism of John's great-great-grandfather James Liddell, who was born 1808 in Alva and who died in 1860 in Australia. His parents were James Liddle and Isobel Drysdale. The record notes that the son was born and baptized. It does not refer to him as a 'lawful' son, so we can only presume that James and Isobel were not married. The true identity of James’ father cannot be ascertained, but now we know we’ve pushed the records as far as they can be pushed. We’ve reached our own “brick wall” in the Scot records.
While driving and walking about the area, it seemed to us that the streets and houses of Alva must not have changed in 200 years, apart from the satellite dishes attached to each dwelling. Of course, this cannot be so but since we only drove down the main street and could not see well beyond the first row of dwellings, then who can say what has changed and what has not?
In the Visitor Centre in Alva, there is a display of old weaving looms which interested us very much as we are sure that Isobel Drysdale's family were involved, as so many families were, in the textile industry in Scotland all those many years ago. While at the Centre, we found out that the Patons and Baldwin brand of sewing cottons and general haberdashery were also from the Alva district.
Our sojourn in the UK was over all too quickly, much to our regret. We had not allowed ourselves nearly enough time to see everyone and do everything that we had planned to. For example, I did not get the chance to visit my side of the family or visit the Rand and Cain cousins that I know still live on the northwest coast of England.
Maybe next time, then.
With no stopovers on our flight from the United Kingdom, we reached Costa Rica to visit Peg's third son Peter (John's brother) and his wife Dunia and children Juliana and Christopher Liddell. We were excited to show them what information we had been able to discover about the Liddell family since it was Peter who caused us to become actively interested in searching for the family and its history when he first visited Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia five years ago, when he just missed meeting Colin Liddell, one of our mutual Australia cousins who lives near Brisbane, far to the north upper end of Australia’s eastern shore.
Dubbo also is where my John’s James and his family finally settled “Down Under” and had businesses involving tanning and saddlery in the late 1880s.
On this leg of our holiday, we took time out from our family research and family visiting to visit Guatemala and especially Tikal and the Mayan ruins there. John has long been interested in the stories and culture of Central America and this was a special treat for him.
Our “Digging Up Dead Family World Tour” ended early August this year when we finally returned to our New Zealand homeland, having survived bomb scares, plane crashes and other terrorist activities occurring in our wake and even sometimes springing up in our bow waves.
Truly, there is no place like home. But there also is nothing like travel to broaden the mind. --So we'll be off again next year, all things being equal as we say "Down Here".
Pat (and John) Liddell
November 23, 2005,
Wellington Province, New Zealand
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(Copyright 2005, Team Liddell et al)