Week 31: Flew the Coop #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My direct ancestors didn't move around that much. None of them emigrated. The same cannot be said about some of their siblings. Various brothers and sisters left Scotland for the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and that is why I find many of my DNA matches living in those countries today.

One of my paternal great aunts, Elizabeth Walker and her brother William both emigrated with their spouses. Elizabeth headed for Australia in 1886 and settled in Wollongong, just outside Sydney. Her husband, James Allan, a coalminer, was already there and he sponsored her immigration. She travelled with three children under 3 years of age! James paid £2 towards her passage on the Abyssinia and £1 towards their 3 year old daughter Jane's. The two babies went free of charge.

Source: NSW State Archives, Immigration Deposit Journals, via Ancestry.

Meanwhile, William Walker, my great uncle, headed for America. He was a blacksmith to trade and would easily have found work in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where local deposits of iron ore and coal led to an industrial boom there in the late 19th century. Both siblings had left Scotland with their respective spouses, drawn by the opportunities for work which their new country offered. Neither returned to Scotland. That was the story for many people in my family tree. Many of those who left reaped the benefit of their choice, although it can't have been easy leaving family behind. Passenger lists do show, however, that some did go back and forth from the USA and Canada much more frequently that we would imagine.

One emigrant who did return to Scotland once on a visit was James Jack, born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in 1851, to a sibling of one of my maternal 2 x great grandfathers. James had left for the USA at some point in the late 1800s with his wife and children and settled in Bristol County in Massachusetts. Like his father and grandfather before him, he worked in the textile industry and that area was already renowned for textile manufacturing. However, he ended up suffering from painful rheumatism and decided to go back to Scotland in 1900 on a visit in the hope that Scottish cooler temperatures might help his condition. In hindsight, he might have been better off remaining in Scotland, but he did return to his family in America. A few months later, the pain, family problems, the fear of him not being able to work to support his family became too much for him. He shot himself in the stomach. His suicide was graphically reported in many newspapers at that time. Here are the headlines from the Boston Globe, Aug 10 1900.

Some who flew the coop obviously were more successful than others, but no one can deny that they were all brave.

Comments

Week 50: You wouldn't believe it! #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

I have already written about my 3 x great uncle, James McAra, who was sentenced to deportation at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1811. His crime had been to attack his brother, my 3 x great grandfather, Alexander, with an iron bar during an argument, with Alexander being badly hurt and dying a few days later. James was an iron worker by trade in Scotland and continued this trade in the small town of Sorell in Tasmania. We cannot know much about the life he led in Sorell, but he is mentioned in a variety of documents. For example we know he was given a Free Pardon by the Governor of Tasmania and New South Wales in 1836. He also acquired some land in 1839, which, in his Will, he left to daughters of a friend. We know his affection for 'drink', which had led to the fatal fight back in Scotland, never left him as 'excessive drinking' was given as cause of death on his death certificate. However his tombstone bears witness to the fact he was well-liked and a 'good and h

2024 Week 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar, butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes. She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot

Roots, shoots and stories

Search This Blog