Warp and Weft

Robertson tartan (ancient)

My dad’s family came from a long line of weavers and textile workers, which could explain why I love fabric. I think of my tree as a tapestry and my brother David and I as the unfinished ends, needle in hand as we continue to add to the design.

The basic structure of woven cloth is the warp and the weft. The warp is the longitudinal thread and the weft crosses it horizontally. In my tapestry there are “warp threads” stretching back to 1600 - these lines will continue as long as we continue to have children. I think of the weft as the meetings of families and couples, enriching the social fabric and binding people together.

A patriarchal metaphor would see the man as warp, the main thread, and the woman as weft, supporting him. In noble families the men held the titles and the land and the women bore them heirs. In my family, where the women worked, they were forces themselves, doing whatever it took to feed their children and keep them together. My maternal great great grandmother Georgina McCabe was a ropeworker at the Edinburgh Roperie and a labor union organizer. This family was tightly woven, working and living together in tight quarters.

That’s why I broadened my research to include the families of the wives of the Moffats and Robertsons as it’s a much richer story.

The furthest edge of the tapestry frays, the threads hard to connect. When I’ve done everything I can to find the very earliest ancestor in a line I “tie a knot” and mark my search as finished so that I can start to think about the design of the tapestry as a whole. What are the patterns in it? Who shines brightly; whose stories stand out?

Leith families woven on Excel