Happy Fathers Day

Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads out there!

Like Mother’s Day, I can’t help but think about family history on Father’s Day.  I always take a moment to think about all the fathers in my family tree and reflect on everything they sacrificed and fought for over the centuries, to allow me and my immediate family to live the way we do. 

And each year I take the time to thank Mel Gibson.

I know what you’re thinking…whaaaaaaat?  Mel Gibson?  What does he have to do with Father’s Day?  Isn’t he some sort of a celebrity pariah now?



Swordfights!  Yeah!



Well, I have to thank him because he got me interested in my family history.  When I was a junior in high school, the epic movie Braveheart was released in 1995.  I went to see it with my father---what red blooded American teenager wouldn’t want to see a 3 hour swordfight??  I had never heard of William Wallace and had no idea what I was in for...but the previews I saw on TV looked cool!

That movie stirred something inside me that I never knew was there: a fascination with Scotland.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  In the months after I saw Braveheart, I went to the library at my school and checked out every book on Scotland I could get my hands on---folk tale anthologies, histories, textbooks, it didn’t matter.  If it was about Scotland, I was reading it.  The funny part was, I had no idea why.  It was like I was learning stuff that I should have known but didn’t, and didn’t even know why I should have known about.  It’s hard to explain.

Then on a family vacation to Florida later that year, I passed a bookstore that had a display in the window of Braveheart books---the novelization of the movie, based on the screen play written by Randall Wallace.  I couldn’t resist.  In the foreword, Mr. Wallace wrote about being on a trip of his own in Scotland, where he saw a statue of William Wallace (for those of you who don’t know---he’s the sort of the Scots version of George Washington) and got curious about whether he was related or not.

That one sentence literally changed my life.  I asked my dad about our last name---where did Vaught name come from?  He explained how he wasn’t sure, but he thought Germany.  He had done some genealogy research years back before I was born and found out some stuff from his grandparents and aunts and uncles, but then lost interest when his children were born.

When we got back home from that trip, the summer before I went off to college, I begged my father to pull out all his research and we spent a weekend pouring over everything.  It was all handwritten, black and white photocopies, and old photographs.  About 15 years of research stuffed into one large manila envelope.  My entire family history. 

When I got to college, I was introduced to the joys of a T1 internet connection in the dorms at the University of Delaware.  I got myself a family history computer program (Family Tree Maker) and the Internet opened up a whole new world of genealogy.  By the end of my first semester in college, I had more than doubled the size of our family tree, confirmed about 98% of the “family legends” my dad had recorded and was thoroughly hooked on Genealogy. 

That was 11 years ago.  I now have close to 9,700 people in my database and it’s still growing because now I’m really focusing on my mother’s family tree.  I know my place in the long chain of Vaughts, Tuckers, Snows, Denunes, Pinners, Wards, Cramers, Wells, Scotts and a host of other families.   If you’re reading this blog, then chances are either you fat-fingered the web address or you’re addicted to genealogy too.  And if you’re a fellow family historian, then likely you’ve had that “Eureka!” moment too, when the dark veil of ignorance was suddenly lifted from your eyes and you saw a path to your past clear as day for the first time, ever.  And it made you feel complete---like you belong. 

And you loved it.

In 2008 my wife and I took a belated honeymoon to Scotland and England.  While we were there, visiting the Isle of Skye, I had an experience that, while not exactly spiritual, came pretty close, genealogically speaking.  I’ll go into details when I do a post on my connection to the Denune family, but to make a long story short, on the Isle of Skye, a local woman informed me over tea that I “had the look of the Campbells down south”.   When I came home and did some more research, I located the Scottish homestead I was looking for: Dunoon, Scotland, deep in the heart of the lands held by Clan Campbell.  More on that later… 

Now that I am a father of two myself (I still can’t get used to that idea!), the ability to pass on the knowledge that my father and I have pulled out of the dark obscurity of time and into the light of present memory to my children is something precious to me.  So many people in this world go through life without that anchor to the past, without knowing who they really are or where they’re from.     

It still makes me smile (and my wife roll her eyes) to think that I owe it all to watching Mel Gibson strut around in a kilt with a big sword and speaking with a Scottish accent.  So this Father’s Day, once again I’ll thank my father, and his father and all the fathers before us for all that they did. 

And I’ll raise a wee dram to Mel and say Thank You for starting me on the path to my history.

Thanks Mel!!!