Yes, it has been a LONG hiatus from journaling, and I have left many promises from prior posts unfulfilled. I have, at least, one excuse: we are quite busy preparing for our study-abroad journey to Scotland — again! Just as I intend to keep our promise to get students to Scotland, I intend to keep promises made in this journal: to research the tentacles of my family’s world migration, to find living relatives, and, from them, to reach back and discover whatever I can about Peter Cromar and his origins — possibly as a refugee of the Massacre of Glencoe — all of this being a part that speaks to the whole of the Scottish Diaspora. My dream of figuring out the family puzzle and fitting it into the larger tapestry of history has often felt as elusive as our dream of taking students to Scotland in the time of Covid.

Three times

The first three times (three times!) we tried against all odds to make the study-abroad promise work, we were thwarted by the seemingly endless waves of the pandemic, teasing us with possible breakthroughs only to crest with ever-higher swells. That experience echoes the embarrassing first few stabs I made at genealogy — a promising clue leading to a blind alley that would be cracked open by a teasing lead that would then be swallowed by a black hole of myth or a dead end of data.

Yet, I’ve persisted with both efforts, and my two promises will synthesize into one come November. This time, it’s for real.

In the Before Times

Our last journey to Scotland with a group of students was in the Before Times. It was 2018, Donald Trump was our slovenly mob-boss of a President, and it was not just a little embarrassing to be an American abroad — though to be fair, we were in the U.K., a democracy dealing with its own demons. While I won’t exactly recall these as the “good old days,” we never gave masks a first thought, never mind a second, and a future where planning ahead could be an actual thing was not a laughable prospect. We had a grand time working with colleagues at the University of Dundee and Abertay University, and left with hope for future collaboration.

So when Mary Modeen, the Dean of Internationalization for the University of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (my, what a title!), contacted me in early 2019 with the goal of creating a formal partnership between our institutions, I knew we were planning something special. For our students, it could be a means to become global citizens and open professional possibilities, to dream big dreams and act on them. For me, it could be all that, and something more personal — a way to connect more deeply with the scrappy little country I most identify with, even if Ancestry keeps tweaking my Scottish DNA percentages down and up like some demented DNA stock market on a wild double-helix-tracked roller coaster ride.

Institutional partnership

The idea Mary and I cooked up was a regular cycle of institutional interactions: alternating years visiting each other’s countries, interacting at conferences, putting on exhibitions, creating publications, and developing a 1-to-1 exchange program for students to have semester-long experiences abroad. We would start that cycle in 2020 with a visit to Scotland. I linked up with Stephen Cohen, a brilliant English professor at my college, to create an inter-disciplinary collaboration between artists and writers that could generate multi-media stories we could debut at the U.K.’s Being Human Festival, a nationwide celebration of the humanities for which Dundee is a major hub. These were all grad-school level experiences we were developing for undergraduates, and very exciting stuff indeed.

Then, Covid.

A Fall 2020 launch was pushed to Spring 2021, which delayed to Fall 2021, which was postponed until we could cycle around to now. Without these delays, we might now be drying the ink on a memorandum of understanding that would cement a formal partnership. But here we are. I feel that I may still have enough runway to see this project through, and to look forward to several future visits in even-numbered years over the next decade or so until I feel confident passing the baton of a well-established program.

Fighting the travel agent

For now, the focus is not on that big picture. We are instead mired in the minutiae of planning. Take one example: I just fought (and won!) a battle with the travel agent to keep our flight to Scotland from originating at J.F.K., arguably the worst airport in the world. We returned, without additional cost, to our original plan to fly from Newark, an airport that is not much better, but at least one that we won’t have to fight Manhattan cross-town traffic at rush hour in a private coach to arrive at on time. What were these agents thinking? Putting out fires like this has become a list of detail as seemingly endless as the line of mourners snaking through London hoping to catch a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth’s casket before tomorrow’s funeral.

Still: it will all be worth it! A slideshow I prepared for our students as a visual itinerary will give you a foretaste of our exciting journey:

Familiar haunts, new places

Sharp-eyed readers of past posts will note that Tomnaverie Stone Circle and the Kirkton of Aboyne will grace the Aberdeenshire leg of our trip. We have not ventured farther north than Stonehaven to visit Dunnottar until now, and you may recall my story of how a random Scot convinced me to check out Tomnaverie, the very discussion that eventually led to my study of family history, as I discovered the connections my family had to that place. When I visit these places that were frequented by my great-grandfather Theodore in his youth, I will be as old as he was when he died (and he died all too young). There is a certain poetic symmetry to this that I suppose I can thank Covid for.

In fact, my birthday will be just 3 days before our Aberdeenshire leg. On my birthday, November 17th, I’ll be lucky enough to attend a welcome dinner and ceilidh (KAY-lee) hosted for our group by the University – quite another coincidence! The following night, a Friday which is time on own, I plan to meet with my distant cousin Louise Rankin, and her family. Her husband Paul works for the publisher D. C. Thomson in Dundee, which has a relationship with the University, and we’ve toyed with the idea of a human interest story that might involve coverage of our study-abroad program. It’s a tangled web in a small world, right?

Collaborators

When we travel north to Aberdeenshire, we’ll doing so with the help of another of my online Scottish acquaintances, Veronica Ross, the chair of the Cromar History Group. She or one of her associates may meet us at Tomnaverie, and it will be great to have a local voice who truly knows the site. She has also gotten the help of Kathy Ader, who is helping us figure out how to park near the Kirkton of Aboyne. I owe all these above-mentioned folks an email to start firming up these plans!

As we get closer to our journey, I’ll be diverting this journal from its original mission so I can record events as we go. Journaling a trip this way is something I have never done and I’m very much looking forward to it. Posts will be much shorter than my typical 2000 word diatribes, and photos will abound as weather and circumstances permit. More to come!