It's a Truely Small World

My latest Genealogy commission is an excellent case in point for just how small our world is.

A client contacted me from sunny Australia to help trace one of her Perthshire Ancestors birth record.  The search highlighted a number of things which I'll save for future posts but that's not the point of this particular Blog posting.

Firstly, my client mentioned her ancestor lived at Pitheveless - "Hang on.." I muttered to myself, "..is that Pitheavelis just up the road from my house?"  I know that the land my house is built on was formally part of the estate of Pitheavlelis Castle (now flats but still there) which was a strange coincidence.  On checking the 1841 Census through the Scotlands People website, I confirmed that, yes, he had indeed farmed the land around where I now live.

Secondly, I noted he had moved to a Farm not far away called "Smithy Haugh" which I did not recognise at all.  A visit to Perth & Kinross Council Archives in Perth Library quickly identified the position of the farm and lead to the second coincidence- where the farm is located is a stones throw from where I currently work and visible from my office window.

So there you have it.  A client from the other side of the world whose ancestor I seem to be stalking, albeit with a time lapse of 200 years!




“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys