Our Family's Journey Through Time
We're so pleased you dropped in to visit our site. We've worked for years on this family and its connections to our ancestors.
This purpose of this website is to follow the descendants (and if possible, to discover the ancestors) of William Alexander and his wife Jean Gillies.
William Alexander was a handloom weaver and property owner in Glasgow, Scotland in the late 1700s to mid 1800s. He was also the small landholder of Bridescraig, a property in nearby Auchinairn, where he and his family lived for some time. William was followed in the weaving trade by most of his children, as well as many of his grandchildren.
Over time, William's descendants spread to Canada, the United States and Australia. It is our hope to document as many of these descendants as is possible. With this in mind, we dedicate this site to all of the family - to all those who came before and to all of those who are yet to come.
We are building a new website. Please bear with us. Also, some features on this front page came with the website template and have yet to be customized to our needs. You can also expect to find a few unresolved text formatting irregularities and some difficulties with the diacritical marks on foreign language letters.
This website takes its name from The Alexander Archives, a quarterly newsletter that was published between 1992 and 2005, in conjunction with our family history book, The Alexander Chronicles, published in 1993.
"Looking back, I am appalled at how little I know about the history of my family. I know only that one grandparent, and if either my father or mother knew their grandparents, or even knew of them, they never mentioned them . . . I realize as I write that I have raised my daughters as I was raised. I have not even told them the stories I am shaping here . . . History shrinks."
- W.P. Kinsella, "Bud and Tom," The Thrill of the Grass
We are the chosen. In each family, there are some who seem called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve. Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have a few. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.
You can use this area to add links to your history pages, people pages or your favorite resources.
The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to doing something about it. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family. It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before. 'It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before. by Della M. Cummings Wright; Rewritten by her granddaughter Dell Jo Ann McGinnis Johnson; Edited and Reworded by Tom Dunn, 1943.
You can use this area for a short sentence before the surname cloud.
We make every effort to document our research. If you have something you would like to add, please contact us.
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