GENEALOGY

        I want to thank everyone for all the help they have given me in creating this website. Genealogy is a labor of love. We do it for our families. For all the hours we put into it the only payment we get is what is in our hearts. To do it well requires an investment of money as well as time. The most expensive book for genealogy  that I have bought thus far was an antique copy of THE HIGHLANDERS by William Skene, which I needed for researching my McNaughton ancestors. (Mabel Uglem married Robert Clifford McNaughton. He is directly descended from the chiefs of ancient clan McNaughton of Scotland the roots of which extend to the Royal Pict family of King Nechtan who died in 730 AD.) I have bookshelves full of such genealogy and history books in my home. In our McNaughton line we are very fortunate in that we have as a cousin one of the foremost Royal Genealogists in the world, Arnold McNaughton, who wrote THE BOOK OF KINGS: A ROYAL GENEALOGY, which was published back in 1977, but although it is now thirty years old a used copy today at abebooks.com will still easily cost $200 or $300 because it is so valuable to the research of Royal genealogy. Arnold McNaughton is my third cousin. He died in 1979, long before the time of personal computers and the internet. So parish records are available today which even he couldn’t access when he was doing his research, and I have been able to bring forth many dates and a great deal of information which he never discovered. But Arnold gave me an enormous McNaughton database to begin with. My McNaughton genealogical database is more than thirty times the size of my Uglem database. Researching my Holme ancestors was a different story. I knew almost nothing when I began my research and there was no one in my family who even knew the name of my great grandfather Holme. Now, ten years of research later, I am able to trace our Holme ancestors to about 1650 AD. In the process of my researching I met Eric Holme of London England. He is related to our Holme line, but our common ancestor lived four hundred years ago in Westmorland England. Eric Holme and I correspond once a week or so through email. I try to have at least one good cousin in each line to correspond with about our genealogy. Our McNaughtons have an online discussion group where we get together on the internet and compare notes and share information. There is no sense in everyone having to go out and buy a hundred dollar copy of THE HIGHLANDERS by William Skene. I bought it and I share the information with everyone else. Last month Tottie McNaughton of Glasgow Scotland gave me as a gift an antique copy of THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE SCOTTISH ESTATES, 1689-90 which is a rare and expensive 2-volume set of books, and which I had been trying to locate for years because it had a single line in one paragraph which was extremely important to our McNaughton research. So, you see how important it is to share such things. Among my Uglem descended relations I have an excellent family with which to correspond, Esther and Otto Kundert and their daughter Sonia. In my Holme line I also have Vickie Sparrow, who is a very distant Holme cousin, the wife of a Protestant minister in Florida. Vickie and I have been corresponding for over two years, email. It was thanks to her that I was able to make my first big jump back in time and take my Holme lineage back to John Holme, born in 1782. So you see, the study of genealogy is no simple task. But it is the sharing that brings about the greatest benefits, as in all things in life. I have met some of my dearest friends through the study of genealogy. The end result is this website, which I have created for all of our descendants, so that they may know their roots.

Blessings on you all,

Thomas Ross Holme