No comments about No Quarter Given: The Muster Roll of Prince Charles Edward Stuart's Army, 1745-46.

No comments about Clans and Tartans Map of Scotland (Collins Pictorial Maps).

No comments about Clan and Family Names Map of Scotland (Collins Pictorial Maps).

5 comments about The Guynd: A Scottish Journal.

1. Ours was not the 'big' house, but the 'gardener's cottage' which we rented for a year, and both the marriage and the enterprise of that particular country home survive. But all the characteristics and challenges of the estate, garden, community, and home came to life again in the author's witty, canny prose. This is the best description of the many, layered facets of Scottish society and how the great homes and their residents fit into the scheme of their surroundings that I have read.



2. I really looked forward to reading this book because I have long wanted to travel in Scotland, and I enjoy extended travelogues where people live in a new land for a long time and get to know the locals. This was a good book, but not great. I had unanswered questions when it ended. For example, why did it take her 10 years to realize she and her husband were incompatible? Why did she keep her apartment in New York during the time she was living in Scotland? I kept thinking that if this were fiction, some of it would be implausible. Still, the characters you meet are worth meeting, and I did enjoy the book.



3. I like all things Scottish. The book can be read, put down, then read some more but stays interesting.



4. A beautifully written and often charming book, but oddly and ultimately disappointing. Rathbone's detailed memoir could be a Scottish take on 'This Old House' - as occupied by a dysfunctional couple. Early on it becomes apparent that even as the author labors heroically to make The Guynd shipshape, her marriage is steadily sinking. Her articulate humor is always shadowed by a sense of inevitable doom, as if she were cheerfully redecorating cabins on the Titanic.
   
   The author skillfully involves the reader in the joys, mishaps and adventures of restoring a crumbling Scottish manor house. But by the book's end, one feels saddened that the effort has been largely wasted.



5. The Guynd was very entertaining. I learned a lot about Scottland that I didn't
   know. In style, I would compare the writing to that of "Under the Tuscan Sun".
   Loved knowing and "feeling" how cold those drafty old houses can be. And that one
   solution is the "aga" stove in the kitchen where you can live in the cold weather. The picture that the author painted of the landscaped and forgotten grounds felt a
   lot like taking an adventure in someone's unknown garden as a child. I would like
   to read more by this author. She's very witty.

No comments about The Highland Clans.

No comments about Collins Guide to Scots Kith & Kin: A Guide to the Clans and Surnames of Scotland.

2 comments about Scottish Clan and Family Names: Their Arms, Origins and Tartans.

1. This is an invaluble resource for anyone looking for information relating to the Scottish Clans. It includes colour pictures of coats of arms and tartans for each as well as information relating to their history and origins. The book is also liberally illustrated with excellent colour photographs of places of significance to the names under consideration. The introuction includes first rate information regarding coats of arms in Scotland, tartans, the Clan system, Scottish royalty and so on. Slightly dissappointing is the brevity of the histories for some of the Clans, for example Macrae only merits seventy words.



2. This book is an encyclopedia of Scottish Clans and family names. After a very informative introduction, which gives some interesting facts on tartan, and a great thumbnail history of Scotland, it launches into a list of the Scottish Names. A short history is given of the family, and a coat of arms is shown (in-color, of course) along with a colorful picture of the clan's tartan. Along the way, the reader is treated to many large and attractive color pictures from Scotland.
   
   Overall, I found this to be a great book, and quite a resource for anyone of Scottish descent (such as myself). I loved this book and highly recommend it to all my fellow Scots!

5 comments about When Scotland Was Jewish: DNA Evidence, Archeology, Analysis of Migrations, and Public and Family Records Show Twelfth Century Semitic Roots.

1. The DNA evidence in this work only includes DNA-Y 12 markers. Everyone in the business knows that the 12 marker is ONLY used to disprove relationships. It takes 37 markers in a Y-DNA test to prove a relationship!



2. I found this book very interesting. I found links to my dad's family through three of his grandparents. I was not surprised to find Coopers my paternal grandfather's family but I was very surprised to find my paternal grandmother's family, both sides, Crocketts, and Rosses. I also found links to my Harvey cousins. One of them has had his DNA tested and found it very interesting indeed. I will definitely look for more research on this subject. This book was interesting and gave me some very good leads to follow.
   M Cooper



3. Not for the casual, light reader. Caldwelll-Hirshman and Yates back up their theories of Scotland's non-celtic history, with thorough, tireless research; and their DNA results of America's Melungeon people leaves convincing proof as to the Melungeons origins.
   Except for the clinical DNA reports, this non-fiction is written in a concise, logical manner that allows the non-science, lay person to adequately follow and understand the book's wealth of information.



4. This book is a complete fabrication. Anyone with genuine Scottish ancestry would be appalled at the stupidity of the supposed genealogical and historical research. The DNA evidence is not evidence. It is a group of people with no clear understanding of who they are grasping at ideas and trying to make actual DNA proof fit their desired history and not the actual known history of Scotland or the borderlands. I question if these people even have any connection at all to either Scotland or Judaism.
   
   The fact is that Haplogroup R1b1 is found at a high frequency in Western Europe. Most men from Spain, France and the United Kingdom have this DNA and there is no connection to Judaism. If you are from Scotland and you have a twelve marker DNA test indicate that your Haplotype is R1b1 it is highly unlikely your ancestor came from the Middle East. R1b1 does not indicate Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Other nonsense in this book includes claiming that one Jewish man is the ancestor to several royal lineages simply because they all have the same 12 markers. 77% of Scotland has the same 12 markers. It is stupidity and desperation to a degree that most genealogists and geneticists should ignore or, as I am doing, speak out against it.
   
   Even a quick google search would disprove these claims. There were no Jews in England prior to 1066. It was an inhospitable place. William the Conqueror allowed Jews to travel to the Kingdom after 1066. They garnered so much hatred that they were expelled in 1292 by King Edward I. At the most there 16,000 Jews who lived in England and that is an extremely high estimate. Most Jewish men were executed in their homes after the order of expulsion and 300 more were tried and executed at the Tower of London. The rest of the Jewish population were ordered to leave and many died or were murdered on their way out. They were very unpopular due to their notable financial fraud and scams and the accusations of ritual murder including the nephew of Godwin Stuart. The Jews that survived settled along the Rhine and have zero connection to the Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal.
   
   There were no Jews that escaped to the borderlands of Scotland or Wales. The Jews living in England at that time were well known and usually were forced to live near the nobility for protection. There is zero DNA evidence of a Jewish presence in either Scotland or Wales. This area was not a place to hide and a Jewish person would have been found out. There was no intermarriage between the Jews and the local population either. Not one marriage between an English Jew or an English man or woman with known Jewish ancestry and a non-Jewish native English person was ever recorded prior to the Jewish expulsion.
   
   My Grandfather descends from early settlers who traveled through the Southern United States with Daniel Boone and may have a Jewish connection. There is evidence that Daniel Boone was not Jewish but my grandfather's DNA tested within the J1 Haplotype and this would indicate Middle Eastern ancestry. There may be truth to Melungeons having a Jewish or Muslim connection but it has nothing to do with Jewish ancestors in Scotland because they didn't exist.



5. This volume will enrage some, puzzle others, and hopefully open some new avenues for thought and inquiry.
   
   The authors make a decent case, via biography, naming conventions, history, genealogy, iconography, linguistics, and, to a lesser extent, DNA for many of those historically in very high places in Scotland having come from Jewish roots -- and, to some extent, having preserved them despite abundant reasons to abandon them. I don't think that they prove the case implicit in their ambitious title; indeed I doubt the authors would actually argue that they had done so, probably feeling that if they have opened the question for discussion they have done their work well. I think they have done that, and good for them!
   
   I do have a few quibbles:
   
   1. While I understand it's now stylistically correct to have the footnotes at the end of the book, this is an example where the book would have been greatly improved by having the footnotes on the pages they reference. Too many times a reference in the text was not clear to me when I was reading the text, but when I subsequently read the footnotes I had an "aha!" moment. I wonder how much more I would have gotten out of my reading if I had had the aha! moment when reading the text. The footnotes, by the way, are excellent.
   2. I had recently read Abba Rubin's excellent "Images in Transition: The English Jew in English Literature, 1660 - 1830" and noted that the authors could have supported their case with Rubin's book. It belongs in the bibliography at any rate.
   3. It's perfectly human when writing family history (this book is to some extent a family history) to choose one's examples from one's own history. Thus, it was no surprise that the authors did so here. However, I wish they had elected to expand their Jewish DNA argument to include some of the J1 and J2 haplotypes found in Scotland. While the R1bs they use may have been Jewish at some point, virtually all the J1s and J2s (which include the Cohanic Modal Haplotype) can be traced to the Middle East with little or no ambiguity -- unlike the R1bs. Another reviewer has noted that 12 markers is also pretty limited to draw firm conclusions from (that's true), and the authors are apologetic about their sample size and obvious selection biases (again true), but I'm willing to give them a bye on this given their 2006 copyright date. For the time, it was pretty good data. No doubt better data is available today.
   
   Since I mentioned family history, I'll add that the book was personally useful to me since I was surprised a year or so ago to find that I have a J1 haplotype, and with the surname of Brown and a very elusive family tree prior to 1800, and that most of my closest DNA matches are with men surnamed Graham. Well, I may not have found the specific non-marital event that produced my line, but I feel much closer to knowing the geography in which it occurred thanks to this book -- and the clear association between the two families it describes.

4 comments about Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America before 1700. Lineages from Afred the Great, Charlemagne, Malcolm of Scotland, Robert ... other Historical Individuals. Eighth Edition.

1. This book has an extreme amount of valuable information contained in it, but for the novice researcher, you may want to wait on this one. There's no plot to this book, simply titles, dates & places of birth/death, spouses and parents. Occasionally you'll get tidbits like 'participant in War of 1066' or 'Sheriff of Berkley Castle'.



2. Just cut to the chase. This book is in its 8th edition due to the devotion of Weis and his colleagues who carry on his life work. Do NOT spend hundreds of dollars buying research that the geneologist gathers from free online sources. FIRST, if you have ancestors from Massachusetts, New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Conneticutt and Virginia you very probably are descended from or cousin to many lines documented from about 350 A.D. Gallo Roman period right through to the Pilgrims, Puritans, etc. Why? Because as Nathaniel Philbrook states in his book, 'Mayflower,' 35 million AMericans are descended from the 52 survivors of the first winter in Plymouth. Why are they related to uddles of British and continental nobles? Because the some 2,000 Norman families who ruled England married the rest of Europes nobles and by 1600 they had grown to 20,000 and had more spare children than Davey Crooket has money. The spares took up Puritism and or wanted to flip properties in the new world. SECOND, load up a good family tree software program (about $30.00)... Spent 2 years entering...



3. For anyone who has a link from New England to England of any of the colonists listed at the beginning of the book, this is an essential book. The eighth edition is the best of the editions. The amount of research it took to gather all the information is amazing. It is great to see that more recent researchers are carrying on in the tradition of Frederick Lewis Weis. I bought it new on amazon.com, and have used it extensively. It has post-it notes sticking out of half the pages, since I seem to end up looking at just about every other page. The resources given are excellent, and I'm glad they have given plenty of resources for each entry. If I want more information, I know where to go.



4. First published in 1950, Weis improves with each new edition. There's hardly a noble family in Europe west of the Dnieper River that does not appear in this book. The plan is straightforward: Line 1 (of nearly 400) begins with Cerdic, King of the West Saxons, and follows his descendants, step by step, down to Capt. Edward Pelham of Newport, Rhode Island, who died in 1730. Most of the intermediate generations refer the reader to another line, and another descent (or several); in this first one, No. 30 is John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who becomes the root of another, different lineage. No. 14 is Ethelwulf, King of Wessex, who is the root of the next lineage (revised for this edition), and so on. The whole book becomes a cascade of the lineages of a relatively small number of colonial American "gateway" ancestors, most of whom interconnect among themselves by marriage -- usually several times. Each brief listing (this is not a narrative history) includes page-level citations to well-regarded sources, including published histories, journal articles, parish registers, the _Complete Peerage,_ and others. Which means that if one can work one's way back to one of the colonial gentlemen or ladies who anchor the lines in this work, one instantly steps onto the express highway to medieval Europe.
   
   Dr. Weis died in 1966 and Sheppard, himself a renowned genealogist, undertook (successfully) to maintain his high standards, until his own death in 2000; the 4th through 7th editions were the result of his own editorial labors, after which the Bealls (who had been assisting Sheppard) took up the mission. Re-checking and verifying all the previously published lines against both the original sources and newer ones, they were able to extensively revise and extend more than ninety of them, add sixty entirely new descents (mostly Continental), and delete a dozen or so that had failed of sufficient proof. This edition is 100 pages longer than even the one just previous. This is a very inexpensive work indeed, especially compared to many of the other titles on this list, and it should be on *every* genealogist's bookshelf.

5 comments about Celtic Baby Names: Traditional Names from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and the Isle of Man.

1. My husband and I have really enjoyed leafing through this excellent resource. We are searching for baby names that reflect our heritage, but are not ridiculous to spell or pronounce (like my Scottish name is). I haven't ordered any other baby name books...who wants to wade through a sea of 1500 names, when we know we will probably select a British name for our child?



2. I really liked this book. As someone who's been been pregnant five times I've read most baby name books and this one has some great options. (The pronunciations are so helpful). But I had one enormous problem with this book. It's not arranged according to gender. All names are just lumped together in each section. (This bothered me so much I wrote to the author.) I finally went through with a pink highliter and underlined all the girls names (since that's what I was pregant with at the time). It may not be a big deal to you, since many of these names are unheard of anyway; but I hated it.



3. My husband and I really liked this book. While I can't attest for historical accuracy of references, at least this book had many of them and seemed to be thorough with the info it provided. There were some names I learned a lot about, and some I decided NOT to choose due to information provided. I lent this to my brother for his children. We all love it. we chose Fiona and Gwendolyn for my red-headed twins.



4. Wonderful assortment of names (not definitive and maybe difference of opinion on some)> Not divided into male and female names, but then these days with a penchant for giving male names to females maybe I am being picky.

   It gives the meaning of the names,drawn from Celt Languages of Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, Beton and Cornish - 1200 traditional first names from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Mane, with the pronunciations, and interesting tidbits about people that had the name. The only US book with names offering this wide of a selection. Since many people have trouble with pronouncing these names, the pronunciations guide is every helpful.

   Of special interested to writers looking for Celt derivative characters for their books.




5. I'm a name lover. Always have been; always will be. Heck, I even spend most of my free time posting on a message board full of other name lovers. But more specifically, I love Celtic names. I look at every Celtic name book I see. And this is by far one of the worst, in my opinion. So many of their pronunciations are wrong, which means that when I find a name I haven't seen before, I don't know whether or not I can trust the pronunciation that they have listed. If you want a really good Celtic name book, check out Loreto Todd's "Celtic Names for Children". If I had to pick my all time favorite name book, that'd be it.