It was here, at the northern tip of the Isle of Skye, with cold wind ripping at our jackets and a mist fogging my glasses, that I felt I had reached the end of the earth, the final stop along my journey north. As the cliffs dropped precariously beneath us to the icy waters of the North Sea, I stood looking out over the breaking waves and I finally felt that I had answered a decades-long call, to follow over a thousand years of my ancestors’ footsteps back home to this magnificent country.

My pilgrimage started many years before, quite innocently enough, as a middle school homework assignment. I was asked to talk with my parents and grandparents about my family; about their lives, what it was like growing up, and ultimately, about their own parents and grandparents. They shared stories of sprawling farms and urban apartments, memories calm and content, others sad and lonely. Hearing them was fascinating for a young boy who’s sheltered upbringing had etched into his brain a tilted and quite biased view of the world. It wouldn’t be until much later that I would fully understand the scope of what we had started.

It was in those early moments that I began to piece together the first, burgeoning steps of our family tree, which would later grow to become a family passion. In the decades that followed, my dad and his brother took over my family sapling — many of its branches alone and bare — and with endless hours of love and care, built what is now a thorough and comprehensive catalog of my family’s history. They mapped a direct paternal line to a Viking from 1080 AD; uncovered the realization that my mom had two relatives both independently connected to the Mayflower; and discovered that our family held other influential positions in our country’s young history, mostly as generals in war and politicians during peacetime, to name some of the highlights. Among those highs sat many, many lows, bringing color and balance to our familial narrative. But looked at through the prism of time, I was able to finally know, quite precisely, where I came from.

On paper, at least.

People around the world have become obsessed with the idea of uncovering their own origin stories. Who exactly are we? Where do we come from?. These are questions that have captured our imaginations since the beginning of time. Silicon Valley, no stranger to the idea of profiteering on opportunity, has inundated the market with various products from which people can peruse their ancestry, going so far as to mix genetic science with tried and true, good old-fashioned research. A simple DNA sample can now open the door to the labyrinth of human migration patterns and ethnic diaspora that is the map of you.

Until recently, this information lay hidden away in libraries, church basements, and town halls around the world, sealed behind stone walls and coated with dust. Only those living close to these hallowed halls of history, with more than a hunch and a large degree of luck, would ever find anything in the haystack. Victims to frequent fires and floods, earthquakes and wars, many of these accounts simply vanished. Today, people like me are able to instantly connect with their extended and often far flung families from around the world with the click of a mouse. They have crowd-sourced their respective research into towering, consolidated family trees with unfathomably deep roots. We could no longer wonder where we came from. We now knew exactly which branch we sat upon, and where those branches were in relation to one another. These revelations made the world, and our place within it, feel increasingly more intimate and accessible, just within our grasp.

But so what? We know so much now of where we come from, of how our ancestors got from one place to another, and how they met and mixed with each other to create the perfect recipe of circumstances that led directly to our own creation. We have been made aware of the fact that without these countless random acts of life that preceded us, we would quite simply not be here. We have connected data with stories from our relatives to paint a picture of our shared histories that is more complete and comprehensive than we could have ever imagined just a couple of decades ago. Humanity now has the power to know more about our own beginnings than any single generation in history. So then why, I would sometimes ask, do we still feel such a longing to know more? Why does the picture, so full of history, still feel so incomplete?

My direct paternal line, where we know a birth and death date, at least for now, ends here. With Williemo Venator (Hunter), circa 1080 A.D.

One of the intrinsic side effects of this type of research is the discovery of some incredibly detailed — and often humorous — outtakes from our ancestor’s daily lives. One can read names, birthdays, death certificates, and burial locations all day long, but it will never come as close to making these people feel real as it does when you read about how a great-great-great grandmother was the first female doctor in Pennsylvania, only later to be killed in a horse-and-buggy accident, article below. Or hearing that another distant relative, a great grandfather of a grandfather, was a horse thief and notorious town drunk. There were entire broods of children coldly eradicated by disease, great triumphs of exploration and business, infidelities, scandal, and an abundance of tedious normalcy.

The articles my dad and uncle uncovered amused us, they amazed us and sometimes, they even sickened us. Newspapers in those earlier days, with no TV or internet to feed the restless imaginations of its readers, wrote stories and obituaries in extraordinary and often grotesque detail. Many times, we would read an entertaining tale about a particularly colorful character, to only stumble upon the grisly account of how an industrial accident left said individual without a limb. These stories filled the spaces between the branches of our family tree, they were the light that brought these hundreds of faceless names to life. Not only did we know definitively where we came from, but in a very real sense, we now knew how those before us lived and worked, succeeded and failed, loved and died.

An article from the Scranton Republic, written one day after a great relative of mine died in a horse-and-buggy accident involving a train.

The same article as above, zoomed in a bit to highlight the gruesome detail reporters of the time used in their writing.

I am of mostly Anglo-Saxon descent, the clear majority of my genes coming from the British Isles, France, and Scandinavia. An area of particularly keen focus for my family was Scotland, and our collective history in the country. There, thirty or so miles west of Glasgow, sits a castle that carries my family namesake. For over a dozen continuous generations, a Hunter has lived on the grounds of Hunterston Castle. Originally established on land granted from David I of Scotland in the 12th century, Clan Hunter served as gamesmen for the king, and our family has lived there for almost a thousand years. And all of this for the price of a single, silver penny. Hunterston’s laird symbolically keeps silver pennies, minted many years ago, on hand for payment, if ever deemed necessary to make the royal family whole. My family traced my paternal line through this castle, and it was this plot of earth, with a beautiful view over Ayrshire and a nuclear power plant or two humming within earshot, that served as a catalyst for my trip to Scotland.

I struggled a bit in blocking out this piece. On one hand, this trip was a way to connect to my ancestry, to see for the first time a place that I am intrinsically, genetically, connected to. On the other hand, this visit to Scotland was about a car and a castle, a different castle than Hunterston, one that my fiancee at the time and I actually got to spend some time in. After a couple of days in Glasgow, I picked up my Jaguar F-Type at the Glasgow airport. For the first time, I was behind the wheel of a Jaaaaag, here in its home in the U.K., no less. With a press of a button, the supercharged V6 engine growled to life. I pulled the paddle shift into first gear and almost immediately I was faced with the intimidating, but expected, realization that everything was backwards. To my right, where typically more than 50% of a car’s mass would sit, was a window to the street. To my left, where I for many years rested my arm against the door as I drove, sat an unnervingly bulky second half of a car. It felt like I was driving in a mirror. I inched the coupe forward, my eyes darting to the left to make sure I didn’t crash the wide left fender into another car in front of an audience. Then, with knuckles of pure white, we started off on our drive towards Hunterston.

I’ll spare you much of the details about learning to drive on the other side of the road, and I won't spend too much time on the car itself. I ultimately decided this piece should be about Scotland, its scenery, and what it felt like for one of its wayward sons to return there. But this trip was also a driving holiday in an exhilarating car, and take it from me, the car was brilliant. The noise it made was guttural, primal, and, to be quite frank, arousing. Driving it through tiny Scottish villages left heads turning, and if its looks didn’t draw attention, the pops and burbles of the active exhaust certainly did. At one particular fuel stop — of many, unfortunately — some young men came up to me, asking if they could take a picture of the car. I nodded, leaning up against the fuel pump smiling as they posed in front of the car, snapping away Instagram posts on their iPads. This car had an effect on people, this much was clear.

The undeniably sexy Jaguar F-Type. Equally as alluring was this road.

As we pulled away from Glasgow, heading towards our castle for the next three nights, and towards that second castle that my family has had ties to for almost a thousand years, the intoxicating mixture of this car, the country scenery, and these winding ribbon roads was like eating the perfect meal. Through long, sweeping corners, the F-Type dug its haunches into the tarmac and then, approaching precision corners, it would grunt off its excess power, twitch its nose into the apex, and accelerate out with ease. I never wanted to stop driving this car on these roads. All too soon, however, the car was parked in a driveway and I found myself walking around the green acreage of Hunterston Castle. At the entrance sat a sign, one that I will always remember for the goosebumps it gave me: “Hunterston Castle. Strictly Private. Clan Hunter Visitors Only.”

The entrance to Hunterston Castle, my family namesake and ancestral home.

Clan Hunter. Those words clung to me like a warm blanket. It was here that I started to shake off the unfamiliarity of the drive. The exhilaration that I typically experience when I travel was quickly replaced by something new altogether. The land didn’t feel alien, even though I had never been here before. I didn’t feel that incessant restlessness to move on to the next thing. For the first time in a long time, while in an entirely new place I might add, I was at peace.

We spent three nights in a beautiful, freshly renovated castle atop the hills surrounding Largs and Ayrshire, with views from our own turret out over the lochs of Western Scotland. We explored Glasgow and Edinburgh, cities dripping with an overwhelming amount of history and stunning Gothic architecture. In just under four days, we put almost 1,300 miles on the rental. We drove hard through the Glencoe Gallop, its sweeping crags of stone looming over us, sentinels of a nearly overwhelming scale. We sped through the evergreens along Loch Ness, seemingly forever north towards Inverness. We explored the empty quarter of the Cairngorms via military roads, stopping at a shuttered and empty Glenshee ski station, the only noises for miles coming from a bubbling river, a lone bird, and the roar of the Jaguar as it skirted along the beautiful ribbon of tarmac that was the A93. And then, in our fruitless attempt to absorb all the visual splendor Scotland had to offer, we found ourselves at the wind-battered, northern tip of the Isle of Skye.

Our very own fairy tale castle, just outside of Largs. And yes, those turrets were fully functional.

In its element... Jaguar F-Type in the Scottish Highlands

It was here, on an icy spit of rock staring into the abyss of the North Sea, that I found answers to those earlier, still lingering questions; those fleeting thoughts regarding humanity’s constant wistfulness and my personal sense of belonging. At once I knew, to find out where you come from, you must return to where it all began.

For years my family collected and poured over an almost infinite sea of data, connecting fathers to sons and mothers to daughters. We unearthed a thousand names, all of them my family, and read hundreds of stories of both the fantastic and the fantastically mundane. But through all of that discovery, I had grown disinterested. My family would uncover yet another novelty, but with each new find, I felt as though we were just adding another tab to a spreadsheet. The more we learned, the less it seemed that any one person meant to me, their impact on my life diluted and diminished to a drop of rain in an ocean of lifetimes that echoed throughout a millennium before me. But here, two hundred and fifty miles away from my ancestral homeland at Hunterston, on a cliff of rock a hundred feet above the crashing waves of a stormy sea, I felt it. As if by some cosmic librarian, the hurried whispers in my soul that had constantly questioned who I was, where I belonged, and who I would become, were suddenly quiet. I was where I was supposed to be, with the person I was supposed to be there with, the woman who would later become my wife. Thirty-five hundred miles from where I live and work, eat and sleep and where I had made my life, it was here the whole time. There was no longer any question that I was where I belonged. Where I had always belonged. Here, in Scotland...

I was home.

- C

1,267 miles, 4 days, 1 dented wheel and the feeling of being home.