Shine a Light on the Livingstons
And embarking on the Tartan Trail
A somewhat short post today, but it covers a lot of ground.
I have known for some time now that James Livingston (1754-1829) was a Quaker, and last time I talked about this family, I gave you a sample of the kinds of records I was able to assemble from the Society of Friends:
At the time, I was focused on my wife’s paternal grandmother’s Quaker roots, and I finally decided to take some time to put a WikiTree profile together for James. After spending about five hours combing through the records and drafting a new profile page, I discovered that he and his wife already had WikiTree pages!
This was great because I was able to add my work to an existing page that (now) adds several generations to the Wavetops for my Livingston ancestors. I also learned that James Livingston’s origins were in Cleish, Kinross-shire, Scotland, which I did not know before!
The Scotland Project
Coincidentally (if you believe in coincidence), I was looking at this family after I decided to respond to one of the notifications that WikiTree promotes in their weekly email digest. As of this week, I have signed up to take the Tartan Trail - part of WikiTree’s Scotland Project.
I hope to learn some hitherto unknown magic that will help me find the origins of James Livingston’s son-in-law, Thomas Henderson Murray. But even if I don’t, I’ve already taken a few cool tips from the training materials and started using them. My favorite is a template for sharing links to Ancestry sources.
If you’re familiar enough with the code used on a wiki page, anyone can use the Template:Ancestry Sharing to create a link that will let people see the record you cited in your profile. Click through to James Livingston’s page and go down to the “Sources” section, and you can see all of the Quaker records and Census pages I added.
(Now for the real challenge: will I be able to go back and convert all of the links I made manually, or will somebody beat me to it?)
The Nixon Connection
Another wrinkle in researching this family that I had somehow forgotten about: The Nixon Connection. In 2015, I wrote up what I knew about my family’s connection to U.S. President Richard Nixon and realized that I had a lot of work to do before I could claim that I had verified those connections.
I figured at the time that I would get around to it “someday”—and just noticed that by finding the evidence I needed to connect Mary Magdalene (Livingston) Murray to her parents’ profiles, I appear to have done it!
And now for the hardest part of the job—walking away and doing some gardening!