Dear JJ,thank you for replying.I can tell that you are not pleased,and that was truly never my intention at all.I have a complete mystery to solve.I am trying to come at it from a different angle to the ones we have explored here.No,I am not in Canada,but in England.The confusion has arisen for me like this.My family name is Smith,and always has been,as far as I knew.My grandfather's father was Robert Smith,b1853 in Ediunburgh,and as Hume so kindly discovered,married a Mary Ann Byron(I knew that part)in Greenock,and he told me who the parents were;Edward Smith and janet McLaren,according to the marriage certificate,Edward a baker apparently.
I have struggled so many,many times,and in vain to find Robert's birth certificate - even on Scotlandspeople numerous searches again and again show me nothing matching all three names.Nor can I find any family called Smith(Edward,Janet and Robert)in any census anywhere in Scotland or England at any time.However,I am just starting this ancestry with a new computer which I have not used one at all before May,so with my inexperience in both genealogy and IT,I am so very grateful for any help.
!Recently,dad's brother,my uncle passed away and his widow sent me any family documents that she had.Amongst them was the totally surprising letter grandad had penned to the Scottish Records Office in 1990,requesting information about his grandparents and using the name of Swann - this was the first time I had ever heard of that name in our family.Even more recently,after my correspondence with Hume I found a scrap of paper my dad had written about his father's grandfather having the saddlery business and going to Canada with it.Yet another mystery to tie in.Hence my confusion in desperately trying to explain how these pieces of a puzzle come together. to tie together using either Smiths or Swanns going to Canada,nor to finding them in Scotland anywhere.
My apologies again,
