Scottish & Scottish-American Research
Documentary research in the original Scottish records: parish registers reaching back into the 18th century, statutory births, marriages, and deaths, and the censuses that captured families before the great emigration scattered them. The Robertson research recovered a family’s Perthshire origins entirely from the records — a 1786 Bendochy marriage, ten baptisms at Blairgowrie, four Scottish censuses — and documented something rarer still: a return migration to Glasgow in the 1870s, proven by indirect evidence where no passenger list exists. All of it built on primary sources, to the Genealogical Proof Standard.
Featured Scottish Work
A sample of recent research from the Storyline Genealogy archive.
Solving a 1910 Family Mystery
A Brooklyn stone mason, newly widowed at sixty-three, reinvented himself as a game trapper in Georgia — and vanished into the swamps. His boat was found; his body never was. His son traveled south searching for answers that never came. How modern methods approach the cold case that stumped a family for a century.
Explore the Mystery →The Orphan’s Journey
In January 1924, eighteen-year-old Lillian Robertson lost both parents within twelve days. She didn’t just survive — she built: a marriage, six children, and a golden anniversary surrounded by seventeen grandchildren. The story of resilience that closes six generations of Scattered Stones.
Read Her Story →Scattered Stones
A weaver still at his loom at 81. A father dead five days after arriving in America. A son who vanished into the swamps. An orphan who became matriarch to nineteen. The Robertson family of Blairgowrie — six generations scattered across two continents, recovered from the original Scottish records.
Explore the Series →The Research Collections
The Robertson research — and the records and methods behind it.
Scattered Stones — The Robertson Family of Blairgowrie
Eight episodes and a prologue tracing six generations from a weaver’s 1786 marriage in Bendochy parish to a matriarch’s golden anniversary in Caldwell, New Jersey. The Perthshire origins were new findings, recovered entirely from the original records — the parish registers, ten Blairgowrie baptisms, and four Scottish censuses no family memory had preserved.
Enter the Collection →When the American Dream Reversed
The Panic of 1873 sent thousands of Scottish immigrants home — the Robertsons among them, documented through births in Maryhill and Govan bracketed by Brooklyn records. With no UK inward passenger lists before 1878, the migration is proven entirely by indirect evidence: a study in reading the records that don’t exist.
Read the Research →Robertson Family Stories
Every Robertson piece in one place — the Scattered Stones episodes, the research notes, the photo discoveries, and the keepsakes — from the land they left in Perthshire to the families they built in Brooklyn and Caldwell.
Browse the Archive →The Orphan’s Promise
A letter from Lillian to her descendants — written in her voice, sharing what she wants them to know about surviving tragedy, building from loss, and the promise she made in January 1924 that she kept for sixty-seven years. Where the Robertson line meets the O’Brien line, and the research becomes inheritance.
Read the Letter →Have Scottish Ancestors?
This is the research I do for clients — from Old Parish Registers and statutory records to the censuses, kirk sessions, and emigration trails that carried Scottish families to America and sometimes back again. Every project is built on primary sources and documented to the Genealogical Proof Standard.
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