Roots, shoots and stories

A lot of the time, when I start investigating some direct ancestor, I find myself following their siblings and their descendants and finding some pretty interesting people! I am lucky that on my direct paternal line, I can trace my ancestors back to Edinburgh, and to the Canongate, to be specific. Lucky in that records from the 17th century there have been preserved and this is where this story starts, with my 7 x great grandfather, Patrick Mcarra, who was a Baillie in the Canongate. I have written about him and his position previously  here. I descend from Patrick and his second wife, Helen Wilkie. His first wife had died leaving him with two daughters, Mary and Margaret. Mary did well for herself. In 1698, she married the Reverend John Andersone, minister at West Calder. Now, normally I might have left Mary and John alone at this point, but I was intrigued by the pairing, simply because my dad  (McAra) had married my mum, an Anderson! So I kept investigating! They had a daug...

 A recurring name in my paternal line is that of John McAra. That was my dad's name. It was also the name of his father, his grandfather, his great grandfather - and then there's a break - then his 2 x great grandfather - a break - and his 4 x great grandfather! The reason for the two 'breaks' is down to the Scottish naming tradition of naming the firstborn son after the father's father. The two breaks in the line are where my direct ancestor was not the firstborn son and therefore given a name other than John. (If he had been second born, he would have been given that of the mother's father.) But .... my dad was the youngest child born in a family of  12 children! When I first started my family research, I found out that he was actually the second 'John'. The first John had indeed been the first son, born some 26 years before my dad! Sadly he had passed away at the age of 8 from what appears to have been a cerebral haemorrhage. My grandparents decided t...

 Some families seem to be disproportionately affected by tragedy. One such family in a corner of my tree is that of Margaret Johnstone (1812-1894) and her husband John Craig (1811-1872). This couple were a merging of both sides of my family, Margaret from my paternal side and John from my maternal side ( though not from the same generation which makes things complicated!) They married in January 1834 in Shotts, Lanarkshire and had their first child, John, that same year. Unfortunately John did not make it past his third birthday and the couple's next two children, another John and a girl, Elizabeth, both died in 1839 and like families did in those days, they went on to have more children - a total of 12 more over the next 19 years, in fact. At the start of 1854, they had eight children, but that was all about to change in the most terrible of circumstances. This newspaper article from the Glasgow Herald on the 11th of January gives the dreadful details: Article from the Glasgow Her...

Water - we cannot live without it, yet it has been the cause of death for at least three of the people in my family tree  who suffered death by drowning.  My 2 x great uncle, David Johnston, was a coalminer in Lanarkshire, like many of my family in the past two hundred years. By 1867, he had risen to the position of overman in the Windyedge Pit in Motherwell. An 'overman' ( or overlooker) was usually the 3rd in charge, tasked with overseeing the safe operation of the mine. He would visit the underground workings, record reports and generally manage production underground. The 3rd of June 1867 would have started out as a normal working day for him, but by 11 a.m. that morning, he would have been declared dead,along with one other miner,  in an accidental drowning in a mineshaft. The following report is from the Scottish Mining website, where it gives details on mining deaths: David Johnston, dead at 51, through no fault of his own, just doing his job. Mining was, of course...

My family have been living in Lanarkshire for the past 200 years. Both my grandfathers were coalminers and mining and metal working go way back in both sides of my family. I have already written about the role of mining in my family - see  https://rootsshootsandstories.blogspot.com/2023/10/week-43-dig-little-deeper.html  - and it is well documented that the miner's life was a very hard one. Recently I have come across other documents relevant to a miner's life. The one below details a typical wage for a miner in Lanarkshire around the time of my grandfathers and it is interesting to note how it went up and down. The average being around 4-5 shillings a day - according to the National Archives currency converter that would anunt to roughly £15 a day and this would be for a 12 hour day, six days a week. And as a job it wasn't without danger. Here is only part of a list for deaths in Lanarkshire coalmines in January of 1887!! Source:  http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/Indexes/...

This story stems from research into what happened to my Irish 2 x great grandmother, Sarah Diamond, when I dug deeper into the lives of the children she had had with her husband, William Boag, and also into the children he had with another woman, Margaret Muir. Sarah vanishes from the records after 1841 and is recorded as deceased by the time her second eldest son, William, dies in 1855. So I started looking into the life of her eldest son, Thomas, born in 1824 in Eaglesham, where both his parents had been workers in the cotton mill. Thomas had been baptised into the Roman Catholic faith, his mother, Sarah, being herself a Catholic. In the 1841 census, Thomas is also following the family into to the cotton mill as a cotton spinner. Four years later, he marries a woman called Elizabeth Colquhoun in a Church of Scotland ceremony and the couple settle in Glasgow, in the East end of the city. They did have several children, who unfortunately all seem to have died young, as by 1861 the cens...

In genealogical terms 'cousins' do not just refer to your 'first cousins', those people who share a set of grandparents with you. It can be used to refer to your second, third, fourth etc cousins who share a common set of ancestors with you, be they great grandparents or 15 x great grandparents. One of my paternal lines can be traced back to Robert the Bruce, King Robert I of Scotland and one of my maternal lines includes King James II of Scotland, so you can imagine there are a lot of important cousins to be found. So let me introduce you to a very distant cousin. In genealogical terms he is my second cousin seventeen (!) times removed. Meet Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan aka The Wolf (or Beast) of Badenoch! Our common ancestor is the famous Robert The Bruce, my 20 x great grandfather. Robert was Alexander's great grandfather. My line descends through King Robert's daughter Elizabeth, Alexander's line through her sister Marjorie. Marjorie married Sir Wal...