“That should be simple enough,” the genealogist said, and Fin followed him through to a small sales and reception area where shelves groaned with coffee-table tomes, and hard-cover tourist guides to the islands. Bill Lawson stooped to recover a volume from a pile of buff-coloured publications on the bottom shelf. “These are our croft histories of Harris,” he said. “We do it by village and croft. Who lived there, when and where they went. Everything else changes, but the land itself stays in the same place.” He flipped through the pages of the spiral-bound book. “Prior to civil registration in 1855 information was thin on the ground. What information was kept was all in a foreign language. English.” He smiled. “So you got what the registrar thought the name should be. Wrong in many cases. And often they just weren’t interested. Same as the church records. Some ministers kept a faithful register. Others couldn’t be bothered. We’ve combined word-of-mouth with the official records kept since 1855, and when the two match up you can be pretty sure it’s accurate.”

“So you think you can tell me what happened to the Macdonalds?”

He grinned. “Yes, I do. We have research on virtually every household in the Western Isles over the last two hundred years. More than 27,500 family trees.”

It took him about fifteen minutes searching through record books and his computer database to track down the croft and its history, and the ancestral lineage of all those who had lived on it and worked the land over generations.

“Yes, here we are.” He stabbed a finger at the pages of one of his books. “Murdo and Peggy Macdonald emigrated to Canada in 1962. New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.”

“Were there any branches of the family who stayed on in the islands?”

“Let me see . . .” He ran his finger down a list of names. “There’s Peggy’s cousin, Marion. Married a Catholic lad just before the war. Donald Angus O’Henley.” He chuckled. “I bet that caused a bit of a stir.”

“And any surviving members of that family?”

But the old genealogist shook his head as he examined the records. “Looks like he was killed some time during the war. There were no children. She died in 1991.”

Fin breathed his frustration through his teeth. It seemed as if he had made his journey in vain. “I don’t suppose there would be any neighbours around who might still remember them?”

“Well, you’d have to go down to Eriskay for that.”

“Eriskay?”

“Oh, aye. That’s where Donald Angus came from. And there’s no way a Catholic lad was ever going to settle down among the fun-hating Presbyterians of Harris.” He laughed at his own joke. “When they got married she went to live with him on his family croft at Haunn on the Isle of Eriskay.”