Tagged by Tammy!

1. Which famous person would you most like to learn you are descended from?

For one ~ Grace Darling ~ the young heroin who fearlessly rowed through battering waves to save survivors from a shipwreck. I admire the way her mind was set on saving those in pearl and not on herself. She had an inner strength to carry it through and was neither boastful nor proud.

These words below, published in the Daily Mail in the late 20th century, echo the romance and legend that has grown up around Grace Darling and the events of the night of September 7th, 1838.

The SS Forfarshire lies stricken on the Big Harcar rocks off the Farne Islands, but through mountainous waves the survivors see their salvation, Grace Darling, the 22-year-old daughter of the Longstone lighthouse keeper rowing into legend. Grace epitomised the gritty inhabitants of a wild and wonderful coast on that day in 1838 when she rowed with her father almost a mile in a flat-bottomed coble to rescue shipwrecked crewmembers.

2. Which famous person would you hate to learn you're descended from?

Josef Mengele (Nazi scientist)

3. If you could be an ancestor to any living famous person who would it be and why?

Ellen Macarthur , best known as a solo long-distance yachtswoman who, on February 7, 2005, broke the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe.

I admire her gritty tenacity—the determination to accomplish an ambitious, long-term goal despite the inevitable obstacles. Psychologically l admire her motivation and self-discipline.

4. If you could go back in time and meet any known ancestors of yours who would it be and why?

This for me has been a hard one as l have been putting together my family genealogy for some time. There are so many questions that l would like to ask so many different family members.

So sticking with the ‘sea theme', l would have to say the Mackenzie side of the family in Caithness. They had a fishing fleet at Wick, spoke in fluent Gaelic and prospered well on the Silver Darlings. The whole family would have been involved in the fishing industry at this time.

I love the history about this part of Scotland at the time of the herring fisheries and would liked to have met them, worked beside them to see what life was like and to share in their world of hardship and outlook.

They were closer to the natural and simpler harmonies of life where people had time for people rather than possessions.

5 Weird Things About Me...

• I am no ‘drugstore’ cowgirl

• I straighten duvets in the middle of the night much to the amusement of my husband.

• I love power tools and hate when my husband uses mine instead of his own.

• I cannot leave a Sudoko unfinished.

• I am driven, impulsive, creative, like doing practical things and will redecorate an entire room in a day, build a deck outside, assemble scaffolding etc. My husband has got used to leaving the house in the morning and returning home to something completely new in the afternoon!