This blog began in 1997 as a single news page called Nucelus. In 2005, during a long wait to move into a new house, I decided to learn some php and MySQL and write my own blogging system, which became inkyBlog and which now powers this, my own Webbledegook blog.
Thank you to my brother, Murray Ewing, for help with some of the more challenging aspects!
What about the new Julius Chancer strip? That will launch in February, once I've completed my work for Maschinen-Mensch and I can turn my attention more fully to it. In the meantime, have a look around the site, and do let me know if anything is broken. I have not yet fixed blog comments, and there are coding and css improvements to be made, but there's time for that yet.
As a little blog test I thought I'd indulge in a post about my Minecraft world ...
My house with workshop, barn, farm, bee hives, Nether-portal 'temple', and bridge leading to the village
I'm kind of new to this, buying the game for my children during the lockdown months of 2020 and having a go myself in August of that year. In 2021 I didn't play much at all as I got rather absorbed in the incredible Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I picked up Minecraft again a little over Christmas.
The village, with a number of new dwellings and 6 or 7 golems on patrol
Really, I've not explored very far from my spawn point at all. I'm a bit of a scaredy-cat, especially with caves! I've built a house with a farm and barn and I've done a lot of strip-mining. It took me a number of weeks to realise there was a village just across the river, beyond a few trees, and when I got there it seemed to be deserted.
My converted-church village residence looking out towards the lighthouse
In fact the few villagers had all got themselves stuck in a cave, so I rescued them and went home. When I returned a little while later there were only two left - so I blocked off the cave and started developing the village. Now it's bustling with master craftsmen, new houses, and a very healthy number of golems, as well as being protected by a wall of thorny sweet berries!
The lighthouse and boathouse - the lighthouse has been the most dangerous thing I've done - I've been killed four times falling from it and once getting trapped on its flame
Eventually I decided I should get a bit braver about exploring, so I've built a boathouse and a lighthouse from which to launch my expeditions. There's also a big ravine near the village, and my 10-year old daughter, who's far braver than I, has promised to hold my hand when I go down it, and pass on some of her top adventuring tips. My 8-year old son has about my level of bravery, but is a walking encyclopaedia of Minecraft lore, so he's good to have close at hand as well.
Wish me luck!
In the workshop with my hard-won diamond-enchanted armour, and relaxing outside my front door
On my own for New Year's Eve I watched Riders of Justice, an excellent Danish revenge comedy (if there wasn't such a genre, there is now). The action is the stuff we've all seen before, but the characters and comedy are of that delightful Nordic quality and, in conjunction with the overarching theme, sets the film apart.
The previous evening I got round to watching the new Bond film, No Time to Die. As usual it's a slick production with another superb Bond performance from Daniel Craig. It didn't quite hammer in all the nails for me: a series of impressive and thrilling set-pieces, yet lacking some kind of core. Good overall, especially some of the supporting characters, but even so, I don't think Casino Royale has been beaten in Craig's run.
I also finally got to see the documentary, Mifune: The Last Samurai. If you like Mifune or Kurosawa (they are inseparable) then you'll love it. To get critical, Mifune's early films are glossed over, missing out on a chance to examine his development as an actor, and the majority of the content focuses on his samurai roles (thus also leaving out one of my favourites, High and Low), but these are minor quibbles. It's great for a short section on early silent Chanbara films, and also its interviews with some of the now elderly people who worked with Mifune.
Possibly the best thing I saw this year, watching it with my wife over Christmas, was Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back - quite an astonishing look at the band's development and recording of what would eventually become the Let It Be album. The original director of the footage, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, had initially edited it into a piece that highlighted the difficult moments in The Beatles' relationship, giving birth to the idea that the whole studio experience was strained and negative. Jackson has brought it into its full context and the strength of their bond is re-established, along with the joy they evidently had in creating. McCartney is particularly impressive. Great stuff.
Not so good was a TV adaptation of Stephen King's 11/22/63 - a book I really like and have listened to more than once on audiobook while working at the drawing board. I couldn't finish this as I found the changes to the book too overwhelming and to the detriment of the story as a whole. I know screen adaptations have to change, but this seemed to make all the wrong choices. The cast and production were decent though, and maybe if you don't know the book it'll be fine.
Contrasting nicely with that has been the BBC's terrific Around the World in Eighty Days - not yet completed as I write this, but so far every episode has been excellent (edit: up to the penultimate episode now, and one of my favourite watches of the year).
I can't recall much else of what I've watched this year ... many children's films (some excellent - I hugely enjoyed Cruella with its fantastic soundtrack; many CG animations with the same characters and moral of the story that all blend into one), Jojo Rabbit was a stand-out film, Free Guy was on the entertaining side of 'meh', and Don't Look Up, which I watched just a couple of nights ago, was great, if depressingly close to the bone.
Optimism also as human ingenuity through the power of science came through with several effective vaccines against the virus that has caused so much misery and death. Of course, it's not over yet, and in the UK we are currently witnessing the worst wave yet - though not with the previous high level of deaths - thank you vaccines, scientists and health-workers (no thanks, Tory government).
Our own household has not been hit too hard. Schools were disrupted which meant homeschooling our two children at various times, and that did affect my wife's and my work (and earnings), but we did not have it as bad as I know many did. And we staved off the actual virus until November, when both children and my wife came down with it. I'd just had my booster-shot, so was probably fizzing with antibodies, and despite the close quarters we kept I experienced no symptoms and had negative daily test results. For my family it was an annoying heavy cold, thankfully with no lasting effects.
Antony Sher and David Westhead in Travesties (programme, Donald Cooper)
I was extremely sad to learn, in September, that the actor Antony Sher was terminally ill, and then that he died in December. I'm a long-time fan of Sher, first seeing him in Tom Stoppard's Travesties in 1993, and then being hugely inspired by his diaries, particularly Year of the King. I followed his career closely, read his books and enjoyed his art. In 1994 I sent him a copy of my comic adaptation of The Tempest and had a short but kind postcard from him in reply. (Here's an old blog post about Sir Antony.)
Work-wise, 2021 saw my third full year working for Berlin-based games studio Maschinen-Mensch on Curious Expedition 2 - in fact I did no other work this year at all. Alas, this wonderful project is coming to a close at the end of January 2022. I'll leave a review of the project until it's all done, but it's been a fantastic experience, and the game is so good - I urge you to give it a play if you haven't already done so! (Available for PC and Switch now, with X-Box and PlayStation in the next few months).
What will I do next? I don't know yet ... except for one thing - Julius Chancer will make his (long-awaited?) return. I spent my Christmas break re-designing the Julius Chancer/Rainbow Orchid website - this will be uploaded early in the new year and will include the first few strips of the new adventure, which I plan to continue as often as possible throughout the year. So watch out for it in the coming days.
I wish you all a better, prosperous and happy new year. Deep breath, let's go, 2022 ...
These include new recruitable characters (the Grail Knight, the Clydesdale horse, Kobolds and Pict islanders), four new enemies, six new locations, and seven new equipment items ... and more.
"Curious Expedition 2 is like a Jules Verne pulp adventure version of a pen & paper RPG, mixed with narrative roguelike elements, all wrapped up in a streamlined and accessible gameplay experience. Take on the role of an intrepid explorer, assemble your crew and head out into the unknown."
The DLC is available now on PC from Steam, and will be coming to the Switch edition early next year. Next year will also see release of the full game on Xbox and Playstation.
The starting point is Donald's 1887 death certificate, which records his parents as being John Cameron, farmer, and Ann McDonald. Case closed! Well, not quite ... there is no baptism record for a Donald Cameron born to such parents, and no such parents coinciding with the time and place for our Donald or any possible further family. The information was provided on the death certificate by Donald's son-in-law, Charles McGregor, and we might presume it could have been confirmed before-hand by Donald's widow, Catherine, who would survive him by another 19 months.
A number of Cameron family genealogists have attributed various parents to Donald, and I'd like to go through these to see if they stand up to falsification. But first, a couple of basic facts: Donald Cameron appears on census returns for 1841-1881 with a consistent place of birth, Little Dunkeld, and the year focusing on 1810, give or take a year or so - if accurate.
Death certificate of Donald Cameron
There are a handfull of Donald Camerons born and baptised in Little Dunkeld who have been associated with our Clunie Donald. The earliest is Donald born to Donald Cameron and Janet Black of Tomgarrow in June 1807. But this Donald can be identified in the census returns, living for a while with his widowed mother, then as a single man into old age, dying at Tomgarrow in 1897 - so he's not our Donald.
The next one is interesting thanks to the mother's surname, Donald Cameron born at Little Trochrie in 1808 to Alexander Cameron and Clementina McDonald. But although these parents appear on many trees for Clunie Donald, they can be discounted too - their son married Catherine Duff in Little Dunkeld in 1840, and he died there in 1881.
We're taken quite a way out of our expected birth time-zone for the next possibility, namely Donald Cameron born at Tomgarrow to Donald Cameron and Lilias Duff in 1816. This Donald, too, can be crossed off the list as records show he married an Ann McDonald in 1851 and died in Pitlochry in 1899.
This one shouldn't really be a candidate, but I have seen him on a tree or two - Donald Cameron born in 1825 to John Cameron and Catherine McNaughton, again at Tomgarrow. If this were correct then our Donald would have married at the age of 12. Anyway, this Donald can be accounted for in a rather macabre way - in 1858 he went insane and murdered his two-year old son, then died in Perth prison from cholera in 1866.
It's interesting that so many of these Little Dunkeld Camerons are of Tomgarrow. This tiny village does not exist any more, but was thought at one time to be the home of tens of Cameron families, with the tale that in times long past the village was famous for its sword-makers. Certainly Tomgarrow should be considered a possible place of origin for our Donald, especially with the Little Dunkeld parish register being "not very regularly kept" according to records.
Another place of interest would be Caputh, where Donald and Catherine were resident and married in 1837. There is one Donald Cameron here that is sometimes picked up - the son of John Cameron and Catherine McDonald, but he was born in 1795 and for that reason remains an outsider in our list of candidates. It should be noted that the Caputh John and Catherine are not the same as the Inverness couple with the same names, the first married in 1792 and the latter in 1807, though they are sometimes amalgamated as their marriages are hard to find (search for Ketrin and Ketherin rather than Catherine).
A couple with the same names had a 'lawful son', Allan Cameron, in Clunie in 1811, and a Peter Cameron was also born there in 1829 to similarly-named parents - but these are different couples as Peter was a 'natural child' (illegitimate).
Some researchers have discovered a Donald Cameron born to a John Cameron and Ann McDonald and attributed them as our Clunie Donald's parents. The birth date is not quite right - with a likely baptism record of 1817 and census returns indicating the early 1820s. Also his place of birth is Sleat, Inverness, a long way off. But this Donald did actually die in Perthshire, and, remarkably, does have a connection to our Donald - though he is not our Donald.
John Cameron and Ann McDonald appear to have married in Inverness in 1807, and I can find only two children that may be theirs - Donald (1817) and Lachlan (1821). Donald went on to marry Helen Stewart in Blairgowrie and they had seven known children, including a Daniel Cameron in 1859. This Daniel married Sarah Cameron in Largo in 1891 - and this Sarah is a granddaughter of our Clunie Donald, through Margaret (born Caputh in 1841). Daniel and Sarah went on to have seven children of their own before emigrating to Canada around 1930.
Area map highlighting Tomgarrow, Inver, Little Dunkeld, Birnam, Caputh and Clunie
That covers the majority of candidate parents most often cited from the old parish records, though I've decided not to include my notes on various other theories (illegitimacy, Ann McDonald remarrying, etc.). But let's look at some other families of interest I've found through other routes ...
In 1911 Agnes Craig Wallace, one of Donald Cameron's grandadughters, who ran a confectionary shop in Birnam, Little Dunkeld, had as a boarder the daughter of a Dundee medical practitioner, one Alice Jane Gray. Alice was a music teacher, and while she may have just been lodging with the Wallaces, it seems she stamped some kind of impression as Agnes gave birth to a daughter six months later who she named Margaret Jean Gray.
What was Alice Jane Gray to Agnes, was she a relative? If we look into her family history we find she was descended from two Cameron families of Blair Atholl, Perthshire - that of Finlay Cameron and Christina McDonald (on her maternal grandfather's side), and of Alexander Cameron and Margaret McDonald (on her maternal grandmother's side).
Finlay and Christina had a son, Donald in 1799, and he can be accounted for as dying in Edinburgh in 1870. Of more interest is Alexander and Margaret. Our Clunie Donald named his first son Alexander (it's perhaps notable, or not, that he didn't name any of his known children John), and his second daughter was Margaret (the first was Ann, so that may have significance).
Alex and Margaret Cameron had a son, Donald, in Blair Atholl in 1807 - close enough to the date we're looking for and I have not yet been able to find any trace of him after his baptism. The splinter in the theory is his birthplace, as Clunie Donald is very insistent he was born in Little Dunkeld, not Blair Atholl (20 miles north). If these Donalds were the same person, then that would make Agnes Wallace (b.1869) and Alice Gray (b.1868) second cousins - they also lived in the same quarter of Dundee through the 1880s and 90s.
It's a tenuous theory with not a lot to back it up - but then Agnes Wallace was partially responsible for me breaking down the Catherine Campbell brick wall a couple of years ago, after researching her husband's first wife, Sarah Sim. Many family connections seem to gravitate around Agnes.
Agnes Wallace can also lead us to another theory, this time discovered through her younger brother, James Wilson. When he married, at age 30 in Birnam in 1906 to Jessie Campbell, one of the witnesses was James Crockett. James was the son of Frank Crockett and his wife Janet, and a family story involving visits to her claims that she may have been "a relative". This becomes more interesting when we find that Janet was indeed a Cameron, the daughter of Alexander Cameron and Helen Anderson, and born in Caputh in 1864.
The Crocketts lived in the Little Dunkeld village of Inver (Frank would abandon the family and disappear in 1894), and that's where Alexander Cameron died in 1904. His death certificate reveals his parents to have been John Cameron, soldier, and Ann Auld - names tantalisingly close to our Clunie Donald's John Cameron and Ann McDonald.
Unfortunately nothing can be found of this couple. The military connection is interesting because Donald married Catherine Campbell, the daughter of a sergeant in the 42nd Foot - I note there is a John Cameron of Dunkeld also in the 42nd Foot from that era - but there were, as we know, a lot of Camerons from the area at that time.
Alexander was born in Caputh in 1826, some years after the supposed birthdate of Donald, and 11 years before he was married in the same place (Alexander would marry there in 1852). Another link of curiosity is that while Agnes Wallace and her husband ran the sweet shop in Birnam, Janet Crockett's sister-in-law, Helen Cameron, ran one in Dunkeld, less than a mile away across the Dunkeld Bridge.
Dunkeld and Birnam joined across the Tay in an aerial photo from the 1950s
All these historical whispers leave fairly loose ends and nothing at all concrete, but do seem to have at least some significance worth keeping in mind. The last strand I'd like to look at is DNA, and with such a lack of records I feel this perhaps offers the most hope for an answer to the problem of Donald Cameron's parents.
Currently I have 13 Cameron DNA matches who I can definitley place in the known Donald Cameron/Catherine Campbell family, but there are a handful of less certain matches that contain Cameron families, with a couple worth looking into.
One of these has a John and Alexander Cameron born at Little Dunkeld in 1810 and 1813, right in our zone of interest. Their parents were John Cameron, carpenter, and Catherine Kennedy, resident at Tomgarrow. Confusingly, this turns out not to be the Cameron hotspot of Tomgarrow at Little Dunkeld, but a place some 20 miles to the west in Kenmore, where their first son, William was born in 1806. The Little Dunkeld births were at Ballinrich, a farm on the banks of the River Braan. Not much else stands out from this family in relation to our mystery. The family mainly stayed in Kenmore, with son John becoming a teacher and moving to Argyllshire.
The most fascinating DNA link contains no Cameron name at all. I have about 15 matches, a handful quite meaningful (28cM), with Isle of Sky ancestry - notably Lamont - that emigrated and settled in Prince Edward Island, Canada c.1803. The Cameron connection exists because these matches are shared by at least four of my definite Cameron cousins, with our common ancestors being Donald and Catherine Cameron.
I've spent many months looking into this connection with no obvious linking point as yet. It centres on shared DNA in chromosome 13 (with over 70 matches so far) and brings in a number of other Scots families as well as the Lamonts, including McDonalds, McLeods, McGregors, McLeans and McLellans, among others ... it would be another article in itself to try and present it all.
While these matches could theoretically link to Catherine Campbell's forebears, I managed to break down her brick wall a couple of years ago (see Finding Mrs Keir) and her family points largely to Caithness, which leans towards the likelihood of the match linking to our unknown Donald Cameron parents, perhaps the "McDonald" mother. Maybe Donald was illegitimate, or his mother came from outside of Perthshire, and keeping an eye on this DNA puzzle could well be the key to any future breakthrough, and I'd be especially interested to hear from any fellow Cameron descendants who have DNA links to Prince Edward Island in the early 1800s.
I present this little article as a waypoint in my research (all errors my own, please feel free to correct anything), and to share the load with my fellow Camerons in the hope that an answer is somewhere out there. We'll keep digging!
We bought a Switch last Christmas, mostly for the children to play Minecraft and Animal Crossing, but I did also happen to buy Zelda: Breath of the Wild for myself - which the children quickly got absorbed by as well.
So it's really exciting now to see and play Curious Expedition 2 on our nice big TV screen - it does look rather splendid - and especially as I've not been able to play-test the game for a while as I'm on a Mac at home.
It's available from the Nintendo eShop for just £16.99 - check out the trailer here.
As well as a number of improvements and software tweaks from the team, I've worked on a large number of new art assets, with art director Johannes Kristmann, that have now been imported into the storyline.
These include a new 'corrupted world' biome complete with a new tribe, the Pale Masks, and a selection of new characters and enemies, including the T-Rex, the Stygimoloch, a mountable jellyfish, the Zouave veteran, the monstrous, tentacled 'Duke', and a rather cute truffle-hog called Joobee.
The New Director update is free and there are further updates planned in the coming months. If you want to give Curious Expedition 2 a play, then it's currently on sale (for one more day) over at Steam.
There was no sign of a husband with her in the 1841 census of Anstruther Wester, where she lived with her two children, and the 1851 census revealed she was a widow. Through the records of the Fife Family History Society I soon found out her husband, John Birrell, had died by drowning in July 1840 - just two years after they were married - the only details being that he was a ship's carpenter, and the locations of the accident ('River Mersay') and his burial ('Stormount').
The only River Mersey I knew was at Liverpool, and the only Stormont I knew was in Belfast - places separated by 140 miles of Irish Sea, but perhaps making sense for a ship en-route from England to Northern Ireland.
Regularly over the next 20 years I would check resources and newspapers to try and uncover any mention of the drowning of John Birrell, with no luck. The closest I came was a boat swamped on the Mersey and in which two of the four mechanics on board were drowned - no names were mentioned, but the date was off of Birrell's recorded death by just two days.
I probably hadn't done a 'Birrell check' for about three years when I decided to try again a couple of days ago, and this time I hit the mark. In that three years, the British Newspaper Archive had added the Shipping & Mercantile Gazette to their library, and in this publication was the following story, syndicated from the Montrose Review:
"MONTROSE - July 24: ... two men belonging to a Montrose vessel, the Mars, Captain Younger, last week met a watery grave. The vessel was then lying at Fleetwood, in Lancashire; and the men, whose names were John Burrell and John Menzies, having gone ashore on Tuesday night, were returning in a small boat, early next morning, when they were drowned. The boat was picked up next day, five miles from the vessel; and the bodies of the unfortunate mariners were also found. Burrell was a native of Anstruther; Menzies, of Montrose, and has left a widow and small family."
The date of death and his place of origin, Anstruther, are correct, though a couple of other details seem odd. Fleetwood is about 30 miles north of the Mersey, so either the place of drowning is not right, or they went for quite a trip. The burial at Stormont makes sense as the next destination of the Mars was Quebec, though the only report I can find so far seems to indicate it sailed from Fleetwood on the 23 July, whereas John's burial is recorded as the 17th. Hopefully, with these new details, I'll be able to get a clearer picture sometime soon.
John was just 22 when he died, but managed to have two children with Peggy (who lived to 79), both of whom would go on to have families of their own. Son Andrew married in 1858 and had two sons, one a school master, the other a soldier and then shale miner, both producing families of their own. The other child, my ggg-grandmother, married in 1859 and had 12 children, a number of them successful in Dundee-based businesses, and most surviving to have families of their own as well.
I visited the grave of Peggy Auchterlonie, at Crail, in 2002 (her actual age was 79)
Murray and I started the War Films series back in 2014 - seven years ago ... and it's only ten podcasts! Well, we did say we wouldn't keep to a regular schedule.
Before that we'd recorded ten podcasts for the Adventure Films Podcast. Those went up much more quickly - ten films from May to December 2011.
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