Extended Family Easter Weekend

I will wait until my trip to Scotland in August to fully break down my family tree and my Scottish connections – which account for my love for that country and the history of my ancestors there. Most of those Scottish ancestors have been gone for many generations and the Paterson footprint is fading from the hilly, sheep-strewn terrain. But I still love the country more than anywhere else I have ever traveled (and can hardly believe I will be nearly a year on this island before I venture up north).

In the meantime, though, my Easter weekend away from the big city included some of these Scottish connections, ancestors of ancestors who keep me grounded in the UK. I bussed down to Oxfordshire to spend the four-day holiday with my extended family there. I’ve mentioned Pearl, my cousin and London Mom who graciously put me up when I first arrived six months ago and who, thanks to a mere five-minute walk between flats, looks after me at least once a week still. Pearl and her sister Mary are like city mouse and country mouse. Mary has lived for 40 years in a town called Benson (population 4,464), which is about half an hour from Oxford. There she spent many blissful years with her wonderful husband Garrow, who sadly passed away three years ago. They raised three children – Clair, Colin and Catriona – who are all grown up now.

Everyone (well, almost everyone) reconvened at the Red House over Easter Weekend. The head count was 15 at its highest, but started with a lovely quiet night of just two: Mary and myself, curled up by the fire, watching telly and preparing for the crowds to descend.

Clair, Mary and Garrow’s eldest, traveled down from Yorkshire with her three kids ¬– Oliver (15), Molly (12) and Jesse (9) – on Friday, unpacking in the Red House for a long holiday from school. The youngest, Katie, and her husband Andy joined us intermittently from Oxford with their kids – Kojo (3) and Isla (9 months). And Pearl came down from London on Saturday with visiting Norwegian cousins Kirstie and Henning, along with their sons – Martin (8) and Jonathan (6). The only no-shows were Colin and his wife Naomi, who stayed up in Manchester for the weekend.

To understand how I am related to all of these Brits and Scots (and Norwegians), we have to trace my family tree back three generations. My beloved grandfather Robert (Bob) Kerr Paterson is Pearl and Mary’s first cousin, though they fit better into the age bracket with my father’s generation. The age disparity comes from the fact that Bob’s mother Elizabeth (Bessie) Holmes Paterson and Pearl and Mary’s mother Connie are the oldest and near youngest, respectively, of 10 children born 14 years apart to Mary and James Holmes in Greenock, Scotland. Bessie was whisked off to the colonies, and the life of a doctor’s wife in Ottawa, by her second cousin, Robert Kerr Paterson, 19 years her senior, where she raised another Mary and twins Bob (my grandfather) and Libby. In the midst of WWII, Connie married a sea captain in the merchant navy named John Brown from Scotland’s Hebride islands and raised two daughters, Pearl and Mary. Jeana (another Holmes sister and Kirstie’s grandmother) married William, who was known as Bill. They had two children, fraternal twins John and Liz, who married a Norwegian she met while attending university in Glasgow, relocating to a town outside of Oslo in the mid-60s.

There you have it, a somewhat convoluted branch of my family tree. It would probably be a lot simpler to show you an actual visual tree, but I will save that for the summer and a mini-reunion that will see a collection of Scots on Tiree in early August.

So the various leafs of my family tree gathered in Oxfordshire for a relaxing Easter weekend, a variation of our number taking part in both spur-of-the-moment and planned activities. I visited a nearby farm with the kids to see enormous pigs, baby lambs and friendly alpacas; wandered around Oxford for an afternoon with Katie, who works for the university, as our trusty tour guide (My highlight: walking through the Christ Church dining hall which also acts as the Hogwarts’ dining hall in the Harry Potter films.); enjoyed a Sunday afternoon Easter egg hunt for the kids in the expansive orchard behind Mary’s friends’ cottage; and relished in a 15-head Easter dinner and then Easter breakfast with the entire gang.

As you can imagine, we ate well and we relaxed well. I’m so glad I took advantage of the long weekend and fled the city, and that I was so welcome at the family gathering. While I have seen Mary and her grown kids in individual spurts since I moved over here, it was my first time experiencing the whole family (minus Colin) together. While it did make me miss my own immediate family back in Ottawa (and our traditional Easter dinner at the Gibson’s), I am so grateful to have been included in the same traditions over here.