Re: new pages

[Niven Sinclair <niven@niven.co.uk>]

At 17:20 21/02/00 -0800, you wrote:
>Dear cousins,
>
>This link www.clansinclairusa.org/ev_scand.htm  is a new one from the
>History index and now gives you the Sinclair connections to Scandinavia as
>they come to my attention.   What do you know that could go here?
>
>This is one little trivia link of interest about the "Sinclair Chains"  is
>now working. http://www.clansinclairusa.org/clan_fam_dir.htm#CHAINS
>
>Now there is another history link that seeks to answer the question posed
>last year "Why did the Sinclairs leave Scotland?"
>www.clansinclairusa.org/ev_Diaspora.htm       So a list is developing at
>this site with examples for each entry.   People left usually because things
>at home were bad and an opportunity for improvement came along.   So to
>balance this, I will add at some time just how bad it was at home for the
>people without land and no hope for the future.
>
>  It occured to me that these are reasons that a man or a husband and family
>would leave but what of single women.
>    There are stories of Scandinavian and other nationalities where the women
>came as "mail order brides"
>    Sometimes marriages were arranged in the mother country and the bride
>perhaps unknown to the groom came to be married.
>    The French had "the King's Girls"  (that doesn't sound quite right?) who
>came as a group under chaparone to Nova Scotia and then married the bachelor
>of their choice.
>    The Hudson's Bay Company's families hired single English (any Scottish)
>teachers for their young daughters.  They usually didn't stay single long.
>     My Finnish grandmother was hired out on a farm in the Arctic Circle when
>whe was but 11.  Next she was down around Helsinki as probably a servant in
>a country ruled by Russia.  She saw opportunity in going to America but had
>no idea of her destination here until a woman on the ship convinced her that
>there was work in Wisconsin.
>     My neighbor, Marguerita, whose great grandparents were from the
>Netherlands, grandparents, South African settlers, and parents immigrants to
>Chile, returned to the Netherlands where she married and went as a settler
>to Indonesia.   The Japanese put her in a concentration camp.  After the war
>she learned her husband had deserted her so she collected her 3 children in
>the care of a German family, and came to live with her brother in Oregon
>rather than return to the Netherlands and the shame of being deserted.
>
>    So you see these are all examples of how women initiated their journey
>from other countries.   What stories do you know of reasons Sinclair women
>left by themselves?
>
>Laurel
>Portland, OR


Dear Laurel,

The question is not "why did the Sinclairs leave Scotland?"  It is "why did 
the Sinclairs
go to Scotland in the first place and why did they fight for Orkney with 
such tenacity?" -
barren, treeless and surrounded by raging seas - hardly a Utopia but it 
helped to shape
our destiny and gave us the stepping stones to the New World before 
Columbus was born.

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