My mother, Janetta Hood, nee MacKechnie, died on 5 March 1999 at the age of ninety-one. She had lived in Campbeltown for about ten years as a child, as her father, Angus MacKechnie, was captain of the Davaar, plying between the Clyde and Campbeltown, from about 1914, when the family lived at Narrowfield. She attended Campbeltown Grammar School, and went back and forward by train. She used to describe and imitate her teachers there, especially the French master, who had a small pointed beard, and used to say she had a good French accent because she had a 'Gaelic throat'.

Indeed she came of Kintyre Gaelic-speaking stock, for her mother, Janet MacCorkindale, had been born in 1865, the daughter of Duncan MacCorkindale and Catherine Mathieson. My grandmother, Janet MacCorkindale, was a tremendous personality, who also lived into her nineties, and when I was a child she used to tell me tales of Kintyre, a place she always spoke of as a kind of lost paradise. She talked about her own grandmother, who was known in the family as 'the baroness McShannock'. I used to think this was simply one of those jokes beloved of Gaelic speakers in particular, who like to call people 'the duchess' or 'lady so-and-so', however humble they might be. She also told me that she had a great-grandfather called Adam MacCorkindale who had ten sons and one daughter, but didn't know any more about this patriarch, except the names of some of the sons, Malcolm, Hugh, Neil, Donald and Duncan.

It wasn't until twenty years after my grandmother's death that I began to be interested in genealogy. I was living in Drummond Place in Edinburgh, only half a mile from Register House, and so it was possible to do a blitz on the Kintyre Old Parish Registers and try to nail down this Adam, and even, with luck, the baroness McShannock, in spite of her mythic sound.

Tracing back from Janet, I found her father, Duncan MacCorkindale (who, I knew from my grandmother's stories of her youth, was a strict Free Churchman) as a colporteur in Campbeltown, as well as a jail-warden and a teacher. He was also an enumerator in the 1871 census. He had married at Margmonagach in 1864 Catherine Mathieson, daughter of Dugald Mathieson and Elizabeth Taylor. Duncan himself was the son of Donald MacCorkindale and Janet McGill of Upper Barr, and latterly of Beachmenach, that striking house known to every traveller on the road from Tayinloan to Campbeltown. As I investigated the MacCorkindales I suddenly remembered a story of my grandmother's which had been totally buried somewhere in my mind. She had, in her twinkly humorous way, related (or invented) a terrible tale of how her father had wanted to go to university, but first he had to delay it because his mother was dying, and then his father had remarried, and his wicked stepmother refused to allow Donald MacCorkindale to contribute to his son's education. Now the stepmother was materialising as Mysie MacMillan who came from Gigha, and who married Donald MacCorkindale in 1859. How many more of the stories were based on a certain amount of truth? I turned to the Mathieson line, and hunted over and over and over again for Dugald Mathieson's death to get his parents' names. You never expect a man to live to more than ninety, let alone a hundred, so I kept turning back and beginning again, until almost by accident I found the death at Oatfield in 1889. It said in the record that he was ninety-five, but he was baptised in 1788, son of John McMath and Helen McShenoig in Largybaan, and so was actually a hundred and one years old.

But, more exciting than this venerable age was the name Helen McShenoig! Presumably pronounced 'McShannock', of course. The baroness herself? Or a daughter of the baroness? At this point I wrote off to an aunt in Vancouver, nee Kitty MacCorkindale, who had inherited the family Bible, for a transcript of the entries, and was answered in a trice. Helen McShenoig, Lephenstrath, married John McMath, Glenadle, in 1774. Then followed all the children's dates. I checked the OPR, and they were all there, Helen referred to sometimes as 'Helen Shannon'. And mostly they were in Largybaan.

As most historians of Kintyre probably know, the McShenoigs of Lephenstrath were heritors of that estate until 1819, when Captain Charles Macallister Shannon, son of Neil McShenoig or Shannon, sold it to Donald McMillan. Lephenstrath or Lepenstraw was a barony, and so, although the title of baron was not used generally, the wife of a baron might be jocularly, or even affectionately, referred to as a baroness. I have not succeeded in establishing Helen's relationship with the barons of Lepenstraw, but my grandmother has been vindicated as being not entirely a fabricator of tales.

The ancestor who remained to be linked in was the patriarch Adam. He too was found, born about 1760. He married Rose MacNeill. Rose! My childhood rings with mysterious references to a great-aunt Rose, whom I never met, and here was how she had got her name. Rose McNeill and Adam MacCorkindale did not seem to have ten sons and one daughter, as my grandmother had said. They had six. sons and two daughters, but there are spaces between those Killean and Ki1chenzie baptisms for five other births, so perhaps the family tradition is in this case more reliable than the parish records. The second daughter was born in 1801 and bore the name of Neps. When I told my mother about finding this strange name, something stirred her memory. 'Oh, yes, I remember my mother talking about her visits in Campbeltown to 'Oud Neps'. Neps, daughter of Adam and Rose, married a Donald McKinlay in 1824 in Upper Barr, and any observations on the name would be interesting. Most of the other descendants of Adam went to New Zealand in the 1860s, and I now have transcripts of letters describing their early experiences there, which have come back to me by a very circuitous route.

As my grandmother, Janet MacCorkindale, left Campbeltown with her family in 1874, when her father was offered the post of factor to Mr. Stewart of Coll (a Kintyre man), and returned for a mere ten years, 1914-1923, you could say that her Kintyre connections were kept alive for over eighty years, as she corresponded with New Zealand MacCorkindales until she died. Now all the links are gone, but my late mother, who was a drama addict, was quite convinced that Simon MacCorkindale the actor is descended from Adam!