My paternal cousin Chrissie, still going strong at 95, is always interested in my 'family stories' and how I go about our family genealogy. To that end, she was good enough to take a DNA test a few years back as she knew that could help my research. Little did she realise that that DNA test would be the key to breaking down a mystery on her maternal side years later.
Chrissie's mother was Agnes Crawford, born in 1904 to Agnes Crawford /Cunningham, who herself had been born in 1882. Both Chrissie's mother and her grandmother, the two Agnes Crawfords, were born to unmarried mothers. Previous research of mine had unearthed successful court paternity claims against a James Bell as being her mother's father, but there was initially nothing to indicate who could have been the father of the first Agnes Crawford, her grandmother, as the father's name had been left blank on her birth certificate. However, a name was 'suggested' by an entry on her marriage certificate from 1882, where, in the place for the father's name was the entry 'Hugh Crawford (supposed father. Printer.)'.
Source: Scotlands People
Now, the name Agnes Crawford was in itself interesting. In most circumstances an illegitimate child would be given the mother's surname, so we might have supposed that Agnes would have been named Agnes Cunningham after her mother, Agnes ( Nancy) Cunningham, but for whatever reason, Agnes Cunningham gave the child her birth father's name of Crawford. Agnes Cunningham never married anyone by the name of Crawford and it wasn't until six years after the birth of her child that she married a Daniel Neil and went on to have eight children with him. Young Agnes seems to have been brought up by her grandfather, James Cunningham and his grown up family ( his wife having died six years previously) as shown by the 1891 census extract below:
Young Agnes herself also went on to have a daughter, born out of wedlock in Airdrie Poorhouse in 1904 and she too never married the father, though she did successfully get monetary support for the child, who was brought up by her grandparents, the Neils. Six years later, Agnes married a man named James Smith with whom she had two sons. Unfortunately she did not get her happy ever after ending - Agnes Crawford Cunningham died at the age of 34 in 1916, five days after the birth of her second son.
Now back to to the Crawford name! Having the name Hugh Crawford was a starting point. I did a lot of research trying to find him. In the end, the only Hugh Crawford that was a vague possibility was not from the Lanarkshire area, but from Paisley and he wasn't a printer, but a draughtsman. And then he just disappears!! So for a long time this was a brickwall.
As mentioned at the start, Chrissie had taken a DNA test, but even investigating her matches and grouping them into family lines brought me no further to finding a link to any Crawfords - until two weeks ago!
I was going to visit Chrissie and I knew she would expect me to tell her some new story I had unearthed, so very quickly the night before, I left our mutual ancestors alone and looked again at her maternal side and revisited her DNA matches on Ancestry. Lo and behold she had a new 'close' match who was termed a 2nd cousin once removed and what's more the match had a tree! Not expecting much, I opened up her tree and found it full of Crawfords. Checking her Crawford line, I found these Crawfords, who had originated in Ayrshire, had moved to Airdrie, Lanarkshire - the same town as Agnes (Nancy) Cunningham who had had the first Agnes Crawford! Not only the same town, but the same area in the town. I took a look at the male members of the family, did more research with shared DNA matches and Scottish records and came to the conclusion that Hugh Crawford never existed, but there were two brothers in the right place at the right time, Robert and William. Robert was a fireman, William was a printer - the occupation mentioned on the marriage certificate. I guess when the marriage certificate was being filled in, Agnes misremembered the first name, hence 'supposed'. The new DNA match was a descendant of Robert and it seems from the amount of DNA shared between Chrissie and the new DNA matches that she does seem to be a descendant of William, with the boys' parents being the common ancestors. That I have the right family is a definite as I have now found more of her DNA matches linking back another generation, but there is a lot still to be investigated!
So I'm really glad I revisited the Crawford brickwall in my cousin's tree. I was able to give her not just another family story, but a great grandfather and beyond on her maternal line.
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