It is clear that there is a lot of interest around the world in researching Watson ancestry, with many personal family history pages on the internet, thousands of Watson family trees on many genealogy websites and a few dedicated Watson DNA projects. There is also a Watson One-Name Study managed by myself through the Guild of One-Name Studies website, part of which involves their Newswatch initiative in which I get sent Watson-related BMD notices from around the world.

Through the One-Name Study, my previous Clan Watson website and a few other sources I have, for several years now, been accumulating data on those that were born or married into the Watson name and cataloging it as best I can. Some of the early results are available on the existing website.

With the setup of this new website dedicated to the Clan Watson Society, I have incorporated a database and have been slowly feeding it with the collected information. I expect this to take several more months as I work my way through my archives, but please keep checking back as the database grows for potential links to your own ancestors.

If you're researching your own Watson ancestry, or even if you only know the names of your parents and grandparents, and you want to be part of the project, send your details to me and I'll add them to the database. My policy is that I will not add details of living people unless specifically asked to, and I am happy to remove or anonymise details for recent ancestors as requested, so feel free to send me everything you have and let me know what you are and aren't happy for me to publish.

If you are just starting out in your family research and need some help, I'd love to hear from you - I'm getting pretty adept at working with the various online tools to track down past relatives, and am always happy to pass on my recently-gained knowledge, and even to help others out with their search activities where I have the time (be warned that my to-do list is fairly extensive and growing by the week!).

I have set up two distinct groupings of Watsons in the database; the first is dedicated to the relatives and spouses of the last registered Clan Chief, James Watson of Saughton, whereas the second is for all other Watsons. As such, although clicking on the "Clan Chief's Family Tree" link at the top of each page will take you James and allow you to navigate around his full tree, you will not be access the full database of non-Chiefly Watsons by clicking on the "Other Watson Family Trees" link.

If you wish to check out the main database, I would strongly recommend that you use the Search function, either via the large box in the middle of the home page or by clicking on the "Search" link in the top left of the sky blue bar towards the top of the other pages. If you leave all fields empty and hit "Search", you will be presented with all individuals in the database in table format. If you use the Advanced Search functionality you can select whether you wish to search in the Chief's tree, the main tree, or both, and select many other fields to search within, thus allowing you to narrow down your search. I would suggest a blanket search, or one targeted towards a certain name, if you wish to see whether any of your known relatives are present in the database. If they are, please drop me a line and let me know using the Contact Page; if they're not, let me know anyway!

Once you get the table of search results, you can view family trees by clicking on the little family tree diagram between each person's unique ID number and their name. Once on the family tree, you can flick between various views using the tabs just above to see their ancestors, descendents, family overview, or even to download their details in a GEDcom file.

If you need any help navigating your way around, please feel free to drop me a line using the Contact Page.

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