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No Longer Separated by Oceans and Centuries
John and Pat Liddell's photos from their “Digging Up Dead Family World Tour,”
WELL-SEASONED TRAVELERS--Pat and John Liddell of Wellington province New Zealand often take spins around the globe to visit relatives and places of origin, Here, the two toast the camera lens with glasses of Guinness during a 2004 visit to a Londonderry pub in Ireland. A scant year later, they returned to the British Isles to visit John’s ancestral home in Alva Scotland and, in south England, the relatives of John's mother Peg. (Letticia Olga Maude is Peg's real maiden name, which resulted from her mother being pressured by older family members at the time of her birth in New South Wales Australia into the longer name but who preferred shorter names and so, instead, always called her Peg.)
John Liddell is the great-great-great-grandson of James Liddell born 1808, Alva, Stirlingshire, Scotland. John has no middle name as his mother gave only first names to her four sons, John is the oldest followed by brothers Michael, Peter and David.
JUST ARRIVED--Peg Liddell and her son John stand near the family's rented campervan in the Alva Visitor Parking Area shortly after their July 2005 arrival in Scotland from a quick tour of south and eastern England following their arrival from "Down Under".
ALLOA TOWER HOUSE IN ALVA SCOTLAND--Dating from the 1300s, award-winning Alloa Tower is one of the largest surviving medieval tower houses in Scotland and is the ancestral home of the Erskines, Earls of Mar and Kellie. The 1st Earl was Regent of Scotland. With many original features, such as original oak roof beams, groin vaulting and a pit dungeon, Alloa Tower was significantly modified in the early 1700s, including the addition of a domed Italianate staircase leading to the upstairs Great Hall. The Erskines were custodians of the young Mary Queen of Scots and the 6th Earl was involved in the 1715 Jacobite Uprising.
AN AGED ALVA CHURCH--This age-weathered Alva church was shot by Pat Liddell from inside her family's rented campervan during a July 2005 trip by her husband John to his line's ancestral town just north of Edinburgh Scotland. This family of Liddells resides in Wellington province at the south end of North Island, one of the two principal islands comprising New Zealand. Notice the overcast sky. It rains often in Scotland and otherwise is misty and foggy, thanks to its nearness to the terminus of the Gulf Stream.
SCOTLAND IS NOT FLAT!--Alva, an medieval town of Scotland just north of Edinburgh, is pressed in on all sides by soaring revetments of near-mountainous terrain, and the town frequently is no more than three streets wide. This lush summit was shot near a residential area of Alva, the home of James Liddle and Isobel Drysdale, parents of James Liddell, the first birth-documented male in John Liddell's line.
ELEGANT, INDEED--Alva obviously is not a place of only humble and frugal Scots alone, for its streets boast of long runs of attractive, large homes with well-kept lawns. Notice the frequent chimneys, a result of living in a land with large coal deposits. Another line of Scot-English Liddells was once counted as one of the four Coal-Baron Families of the United Kingdom.
LIVING IN A PARK--Even the smaller homes of Alva are settled into a park-like setting with mountain forests springing from their back yards and their fronts faced with sturdy low stone fences that rise into elevated greenery beds at regular intervals. --Is that the frame for a grape arbor set near the side of this house? Perhaps so.