This week’s strongest heritage reading begins with records and words that survived in very different ways. Scottish pension appeals preserve veterans’ own accounts of war and disability, medieval Irish texts keep changing the shape of the Morrígan, and three centuries of editions reveal how readers have remade Gulliver’s Travels. Two shorter selections add practical genealogy news and a glimpse of life in Fife through paintings returning to historic houses.
Terry’s Pick of the Week: Scotland’s Pension Appeal Records
“New search tips: Pensions Appeal Tribunals records”: Scotland’s People, October 27, 2026. No individual byline is displayed.
More than 25,000 Scottish Pensions Appeal Tribunals case files are now searchable online for the first time. They document First World War veterans and families challenging decisions about war pensions. Scotland’s People calls them a rare survival because comparable case files from England and Wales do not remain.
The article is useful before a reader enters a single name. Searches can use an address, service branch, military unit, or service number as well as a surname and given name. Wildcards, fuzzy matching, and phonetic matching can overcome abbreviated names and spelling variations. The records may contain a decision sheet, a summary of evidence, medical reports, letters, and statements from the applicant or relatives. About 70 percent of the appeals represented by pink decision forms were unsuccessful.
Why spend time with it? These files can put an ancestor’s own words beside the official decision that shaped a family’s postwar life. The article also warns that the medical details can be difficult and that historical descriptions of disability, nationality, and ethnicity may now be unacceptable. That combination of search guidance and ethical preparation makes this week’s most immediately useful selection.
The Morrígan in Medieval Words and Later Folklore
“Meet the Morrígan, the ominous shape-shifting Irish war goddess”: Sharon Arbuthnot, Gregory Toner, and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, RTÉ Brainstorm, displayed update October 28, 2026.
The three scholars begin with the bird perched on the dying Cú Chulainn in Oliver Sheppard’s statue at Dublin’s General Post Office. From there, they follow the Morrígan through medieval Irish literature as an eel, wolf, cow, old woman, and, most famously, a black bird above a battlefield. Their attention to words such as badb matters because names associated with carrion birds, prophecy, and battle overlap in ways that modern retellings can flatten.
The article also traces change rather than pretending folklore remained fixed. Classical Furies were interpreted through Gaelic concepts, while the medieval war goddess later survived in folklore as the badhbh chaointe, a keening supernatural figure associated particularly with South Leinster. Readers interested in Irish language, folklore, or family traditions will find a careful example of how a figure can persist while her meaning shifts.
Three Hundred Years of Gulliver’s Travels
“300 Years of Gulliver’s Travels”: Alexandra Caccamo, Assistant Keeper, Rare & Antiquarian Books, National Library of Ireland, October 27, 2026.
Caccamo marks the October 28 anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s book by examining editions in the National Library’s collections. First printed in two volumes in London in 1726, the work quickly moved across languages and audiences. The Library holds Dutch, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Irish, Swedish, French, British, and American examples, including translations made through another language rather than directly from Swift’s English.
The most revealing section follows adaptation. Illustrators helped transform political satire into an imaginative work for children, while unauthorized sequels and forgeries appeared almost immediately. The article offers family and local historians a broader archival lesson: every edition is evidence not only of an author’s text, but also of the publishers, translators, artists, readers, and markets that carried it onward.
New Galway and Other Irish Genealogy Records
“October Record Collection Updates”: Irish Family History Society, October 24, 2026. The article body displays no individual byline; the site’s news listing attributes the post to “MelHowes.”
This concise monthly inventory has one major item: Roots Ireland added 85,577 graveyard records for County Galway. It also points researchers to newly posted headstone material from cemeteries in Derry, Sligo, Tyrone, and Wexford through Irish Genealogy Projects, plus an updated 1911 Ireland census collection on Ancestry.
The roundup is brief, and some linked databases require a subscription. Its value is practical rather than analytical. Cemetery transcriptions can supply dates, relationships, residences, and family groupings that civil or church records leave unclear. Researchers should still inspect images or original stones when possible, since every transcription introduces another opportunity for error.
Two Paintings Return Stories to Fife Houses
“New paintings tell stories of life in Fife”: Devan LaBrash, National Trust for Scotland, October 26, 2026.
Two recently acquired paintings will eventually hang where their stories belong. John Henry Lorimer’s The Birthday Party, an imagined family scene in Kellie Castle’s Earl’s Room, will go to Kellie. Robert Gemmell Hutchison’s early 1920s A Hopeful Forecast, showing a woman golfer checking a barometer, will go to Hill of Tarvit, whose Sharp family created a private course in the 1920s.
Before display, both works require cleaning, stabilization, and other conservation, with exhibition planned for spring 2027. The article is partly a fundraising appeal, but it earns attention by explaining how collections shape interpretation. A painting may show an imagined scene, yet it can still connect architecture, family life, women’s leisure, and the history of a particular house. Readers with Fife connections may recognize how an object becomes more meaningful when returned to its geographic setting.
Send a Read for a Future Issue
These selections move from pension files and cemetery records to medieval language, literary editions, and paintings in historic houses. Each shows that heritage survives through records, objects, and interpretations that must be read with care. If you have written or found a substantial, well-sourced piece on Irish or Scottish genealogy, history, archaeology, language, folklore, music, or heritage travel, please send it to Irish Scottish Roots for consideration. Tell us what the work reveals and where readers can find the original.
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