Third Generation

40. Magnus Adamson was born between 1720 and 1735 in Shetland Islands, Scotland. Shetland Islands
extracted from Wikipedia

Shetland was colonised by Norsemen in the late 8th and 9th centuries, the fate of the existing indigenous population being uncertain. Shetlanders have almost identical proportions of Scandinavian matrilineal and patrilineal ancestry, suggesting that the islands were settled by both men and women in equal measure.

In the 14th century Orkney and Shetland remained a Norwegian province, but Scottish influence was growing.

The trade with the North German towns lasted until the 1707 Act of Union when high salt duties prohibited the German merchants from trading with Shetland. Shetland then went into an economic depression as the Scottish and local traders were not as skilled in trading with salted fish. However, some local merchant-lairds took up where the German merchants had left off, and fitted out their own ships to export fish from Shetland to the Continent.

By the late 19th century 90% of all Shetland was owned by just 32 people, and between 1861 and 1881 more than 8,000 Shetlanders emigrated. With the passing of the Crofters' Act in 1886 the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone emancipated crofters from the rule of the landlords. The Act enabled those who had effectively been landowners' serfs to become owner-occupiers of their own small farms.

Magnus Adamson-2273 had the following children: