Welcome to my perfumed garden

Sorry about your uncle. He sounds to have been quite a man!

I'm not into genealogy myself, but a friend in Glasgow is, and her reaction to finally tracing someone is very much like yours. Back to 1601 - that's quite something. One of my cousins did our family tree quite a few years ago and came to a full stop with weddings in 1830 and 1832. It only went back 5-6 generations.

But Scots have a problem in that after 1746, and again in the early 1800s, as well as probably during the years between, a lot of Highlanders moved into the Lowlands, and when they did they changed their names to hide that they were Highlanders, and their children grew up not knowing where their parents came from. But even if they did, the only record of marriages and births was parish church records, and if they lived a long way from their parish church, they often didn't bother with the formalities - marriage by habit and repute was considered perfectly respectable. And burials, and therefore the record of death, were as often as not at the church nearest where they lived, which often wasn't their parish church. Assuming, too, that the records survived. Where I lived near Dundee, the parish records were all lost in a fire in 1823. And, researching something else, I found that the records of one of the biggish towns were lost when a troop of English soldiers billeted in the church in the 1700s wanted a fire to heat the place and burned the lot.