Coatbridge-born author Amanda Jane Shaw released her memoir on the day her father Joseph would have celebrated his 100th birthday. The book, titled ANTENNA: THE INNER COMPASS, was unveiled last week as a tribute to her late father.
A Family Legacy from the Iron Burgh
Amanda's maternal ancestors came from Ireland to Coatbridge in the mid-1800s, settling in the area and working in the ironworks of the town known as the Iron Burgh. Within that family came the tradition of An Dà Shealladh, or Second Sight, traditionally said to be hereditary through specific bloodlines and passed down through generations.
A Life of Extraordinary Events
Spanning 52 years of Amanda's life, the memoir tells of an extraordinary pattern of events, including finding herself at the epicentre of four national tragedies and numerous life-and-death situations, while experiencing an intuition she could never fully explain.
The turning point came when Amanda experienced what she describes as an intense and sudden wave of information she had no conscious knowledge of before, involving names, places and events stretching back through centuries of her ancestry. She began checking what she had received against genealogical and historical records.
Discoveries That Shaped the Book
Amanda said: "The history I uncovered on both sides of my family eventually led me back to the Irish Plantations of the 1600s. As I continued checking the records, I made another extraordinary discovery."
Across the country, places and paths her own life had taken her to were the same places her paternal ancestors had lived and walked centuries before, long before she even knew those ancestors existed. Those discoveries became the foundation of ANTENNA: THE INNER COMPASS, a memoir exploring family, survival, intuition, ancestry and the possibility that the paths we follow may not always be as random as they appear.
The memoir is available now from Amazon.
