Work in progress, so don't be surprised at obvious gaps! I have on the whole  not identified sources by number etc, but everything has been traced through  OPRs (Old Parish Registers), BMD certificates, Census returns or material  gathered by the family.

The Mitchell family to whom this tree refers are the forebears and descendants  of James Neil Mitchell, born in 1906 in Cathcart, Renfrewshire, and his wife  Louisa Lillian, nee Ellis, born in the same year in Mysore,India.  They were  the parents of David, Tricia and Christine; and  it's Christine who has  ambitiously taken on the mantel of family historian.

What is gradually emerging are stories that aren't full of earth-shattering  revelations - there appear to be neither heroes nor villains. Instead, a  picture develops of, on the one hand, hard-working Scots rising from strict  but modest artisan beginnings, and on the other,children in a loving home in  India, shattered when their mother died grief-stricken and coming home to a  very different life in England.

Since the main branch of this tree is The Mitchells, as  I piece together bits  of family history I am overwhelmingly aware of what enormous steps both our  grandfather and Dad took away from their quite lowly beginnings.  Both James  Wilson and James Neil must have made the most phenomenal efforts to get where  they did. They were self-made men, fiercely upright,intelligent, industrious,  and wanting the best for their families. Both saw hard times and coped with  adversity and loss; and I suspect that in both cases they sometimes made life  hard for their families! They found gentle wives whose loving natures must  have filled some of the emptiness in their lives and who made marvellous  mothers. Maybe it was because they were alike that father and son didn't hit  it off! Whatever the truth of that,from these beginnings evolve the Canadian  Mitchells, the Midland-American-Australian Hardys, and the South-East  Jefferys: about whom more later. We are really bit-players in this story, for  the time being anyway.