Northern Branches
Orkney to America
By: Elizabeth Wright

This Northern Branches story is of a family from the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland. They immigrated to Missouri under mysterious circumstances. Margaret Anne is the fifth generation of Camerons who have lived in Missouri. She was fulfilling her long cherished dream of spending the summer in Kirkwall before starting graduate school in the fall. A message arrives telling of the death of her grandfather in Missouri. She ends her vacation and returns home on the first available flight.

She reconnects with Luke Sinclair, her childhood friend, whose family live on the adjoining ranch. Margaret Anne and Luke each lived in St. Louis during the year. Luke was a professor of archeology and Margaret Anne was starting work on her master’s degree in history.

The following summer they returned to Orkney and started working on the mystery surrounding Margaret Anne’s family. They soon confirmed what Margaret Anne had long suspected. The threads of the Cameron and Sinclair families had been entwined for many generations. Family threads continued through the warp and woof of life, weaving a continuous tapestry of the power of family ties. Their search for information took them to Bergen, Norway and there they discovered a link to France. Slowly the mystery unraveled as they worked their way through bits and pieces of information between their home in America and the Orkneys.