The Cross, the little house  with the blue door.

 I was told that a light snow was falling on the seventeenth of February 1926 as Dr. Pentland-Smith with wee black bag in hand closed the door of his dispensary at St. Regulus in Elie and walked the half mile to the house known as The Cross in Earlsferry, an ancient and off the beaten path village on the east coast of Scotland. I'm sure that day the good doctor had a gleam in his eye as his mission was to assist my mother and the good Lord in the bringing of me into the world. The Royal Burgh of Earlsferry and Elie are wonderful small adjoining villages in the Kingdom of Fife on the east coast of Scotland where the  Firth of Forth meets the North Sea.

To me Earlsferry and its people became my everything, my whole world, until one day fate intervened to set wheels in motion that would take me far from home and my home land. I've now been gone from Earlsferry for 56 years but not for one day of these years has my home village of Earlsferry deemed fit to let me go.

I now live in and am also a citizen of the United States, a country that's made up of native born Americans and immigrants from every country on the globe. Civilized countries like the United Kingdom and the United States recognize the need to grant each others citizens the rights of dual nationality. When I also became  a citizen of the United States it was like getting married and mothers and motherlands will forever be what they are. Walking away and not looking back was not an option.

With this web site and at the request of my grand daughter Hillary Renz I pull aside the curtain and roll back the clock for her to learn about the land and some of the people who were her ancestors and the land and the dust that begat me, her grandfather; to find out about my mystic utopia and my Shangri-La, as I recall for her the wonderful days of my youth when with carefree abandon I roamed Scotland's hills and its beaches, I sailed the sea, I climbed the cliffs at Earlsferry and where on a tiny island in the sea I found  my special place.

The United Kingdom is a conglomerate of nations that for political reasons is comprised of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.  Scottish law is different from English law and there is no such thing as a Scottish or an English passport although I hear that this may be about to change.  Like it or not all of the people who are part of this consortium are called British. Scottish passport or not I've never felt that I was born anything but Scottish and I believe this sentiment is shared by most Scots. No doubt the same feeling for the land of their birth goes for those who were born in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

We all have seen the relatively authentic movie Braveheart about the Scottish fight for independence and freedom and of how for his effort William Wallace was executed, drawn and quartered. True that was hundreds of years ago and this is a different time but at an early age this story of Wallace's fight for freedom is burned into the mind and heart of every Scottish child. 

A good  book about medieval Scotland is  "William Wallace-- Champion of Scotland."  The author is Margaret Wallace. The publisher of this paperback is Goblinshead of Musselburgh, Scotland.

Many of the early immigrants to the colony that later became the United States were of Scottish birth and these men and women played a large part in the drafting of what became the constitution of the United States of America as so declared on July the 4th in the year 1776.

One who inadvertently speeded up the process of the United States becoming independent from Britain was Earlsferry's Lieutenant William Duddingston who was the commander of His Majesty's ship HMS Gaspee. In 1772 the Gaspee was assigned to patrol duty in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. By the lieutenant's overly zealous harassment of the merchants, the colonists captured the Gaspee, set it on fire and so destroyed the ship. This event is considered to be the colonists' first blow for freedom which culminated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence. For reasons known only to the Admiralty, Lieutenant Duddingston was later promoted to the rank of  Rear Admiral. He died on the 27th of October 1817 at his Chapel Green home in Earlsferry, my home village. Another Scot of his era and man of the sea was John Paul Jones who is recognized as being the father of the United States Navy.