Greetings, Poetry Lovers!
We are gearing up for our family "Ancestry" trip to Scotland and Ireland this month - Can't wait! Except that I still have some 'ready' to get....
I think some Robert Burns (1759-96) is in order, from a wonderful old book (un-repurposed!) I have:
CONTENTED WI' LITTLE
Tune: Lumps o' pudding
Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair,
Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care,
I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang,
Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang.
I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome thought;
But man is a soger, and life is a faught:
My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch,
And my freedom's my lairdship nae monarch dare touch.
A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa',
A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a';
When at the blythe end of our journey at last,
Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past?
Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way,
Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jad gae:
Come ease, or come travail; come pleasure or pain,
My warst word is- 'Welcome, and welcome again!'
(For help with some of those words, here's a link to a 1920 book on Google Books with a few definitions!)
Most of the Scots in our family tree were already over here by the time Mr. Burns was born in Scotland. I've been staying up way too late, too many nights, chasing ancestors and rabbit trails through the brances of my Ancestry.com family tree! My family is threatening an intervention. I even made a side trip off the interstate through South Carolina recently to go pay my respects to the bones of some newly-discovered Quaker ancestors buried in a small, historic cemetery in the middle of nowhere.... These folks were as old as our Mr. Burns, part of the Ulster Scots-Irish who came over and meandered down through the Carolinas and over into the midwest. But I digress.
Christmas before last, I made my hubby and kids spit in vials and said we'd plan a trip according to where we were from. We're all very, very, very British! (My brother happened to do the test about the same time, and so did my mother, so it's been especially fun comparing generational DNA results, too.)
So off to Edinburgh and Dublin it is, with a couple of day trips to the countryside. We have ancestral connections in every corner of Great Britain, actually - Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland - as well as Ireland. We'll mainly focus on the Celtic roots this time.
What I've discovered is that basically we've got "family" on all sides of every historical conflict over there, it seems. Sigh. This clan attacks that one; this country fights its neighbors - and yet somehow folks cross lines and marry and have babies. Then they grow up and this group fights that group, etc. etc. The same tune across the globe, I know, across the centuries. We can't take peace for granted, that's for sure.
Speaking of clans, I've been a bit tartan-crazy in the studio lately. I've begun making items using a couple of circa 1930 small books, published in Edinburgh, featuring tartans and coats of arms for clans and septs. When I discovered some mid-century Murano glass beads called "Scottish agate" (because they mimic the actual stones), I bought a couple of vintage necklaces to repurpose, too. I'm having fun combining these with the tartan images, clipped and tucked under glass cabachons.
I also bought an older book on the same theme on Ebay a week or two ago (didn't pay a lot for it)... I was thrilled to receive it and discover what a lovely little treasure it is! It's pictured above. It was published in 1891 and is just too lovely for me to dismember. The printed tartan colors are wonderful, and - the endpapers! The gilded edges! And gilded design just inside the covers! It's quite safe for now and makes a delightful photo prop.
Oh - just for fun, I included a pic of "explorer" necklaces I made for Morgan and myself. 100-year-old maps, cuckoo clock chain, vintage telescope charms, vintage Middle Eastern charms (she got my 1 percent in the DNA too), and some fun contemporary metal beads and compass charm. I'll make some more of these this summer. Hers features County Fife, where I've got one line of my family and a line of my hubby's back hundreds of years to the same place... different clans. But same place! And that is happening quite often on my ancestral explorations, both across the Pond and in pre-and post-Colonial migrations here.
My necklace is the British Isles, with a touch of the Western edge of Europe. Which is appropriate, because I JUST found out in my research that "Hood" is not English, as my brother and I thought, but was originally "Hoed" - and, DUTCH! As in, came-from-Amsterdam-to-New-Amsterdam-before-it-was-New-York Dutch. But that's another story.... [And, I hadn't really paid attention before, but the splotch of color over the Great Britain region on the Ancestry.com DNA map covers that edge of Europe right beside it, including the Netherlands.]
I'll be back with more stories and poems in a few weeks - wishing you a swoon-worthy start to June! Buffy has just the post to get us in the swing of summer, over at the Roundup. Enjoy!