Our Dad’s early life was a mystery to us. We knew he was an only child, born in the United States, educated in Scotland, and that he had spent some years working in India, but very little else about his life before he married Joan Harley in 1935.

On 28 June 1830, John Middleton wrote to his parents, Mr and Mrs James Middleton Senior, at the Soho Foundry, Near Birmingham. John was writing from Calcutta, India, but he had ‘been back but a few days from a trip to China’.

I was trying to identify Charlotte, the wife of John Harley, my 3G grandfather, when I came across a tree on ancestry.com which gave her last name as Middleton.

The MacNie story begins with a small loch in the former county of Perthshire. On modern maps you will find it as Loch Macanrie. But older documents name it in Gaelic as Loch Mac-an-Righe, translated into English as the Lake of the Sons of the King. Now the only reason this small body of water is important in our story is that this name echoed something I had been told a few years ago.

Family members may notice that I am not using the spelling of the family name that we grew up with, which was “Macnee”.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this, but I suspect it is pretty high.  It is from one source: “For Love or Money” by Louis Menand in the New Yorker, October 5 2020.  I trust both the author and the journal so I’m going with it.

The tale goes back a little over three hundred years, to the later years of the eighteenth century; to, in some cases, the parents of the generation born before the first national census, carried out in 1841 and the introduction of mandatory civil registration. And I firmly intend to stop there.

On the Gilvray side of our ancestry, Granny Gilvray Harley, who was so proud of the Harley ancestry, told us little or nothing of her own. We knew her maiden name was Gilvray. Her given names, Elizabeth Joy, were not unusual for a woman, but “Joy” we were told was not the familiar girl’s name but rather a patronym.

The Harley Earls lived in the village of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire, a mere seven miles from Hopton Castle, where our ancestor Edward Harley lived and died. Robert Harley, the 1st Earl of Oxford and Prime Minister under Queen Anne, lived from 1661 until 1724, predating this ancestor by more than a century.

It was the day of the Oxford – Cambridge Boat Race, an event followed across the nation – and this year we would watch it on TV for the first time. “You support Oxford of course”, Granny Harley said to me, in a voice that brooked no argument. And then she told me why.

Was I falling down the rabbit hole, or doing due diligence in my research? It’s a fine point at times, I find. Here is today’s case in point.