Roots, shoots and stories

 My Aunt Meg was born Margaret Keir Anderson in May 1909, the daughter of Margaret Keir Adams and John Anderson, as yet unmarried. Young Meg was therefore brought up by her maternal grandparents, Margaret and James Adams. We find her there in the 1911 census with her mum, Margaret, her grandparents and three of her mother's younger siblings. In that census, her mother has no occupation listed, so presumably she was looking after Meg and not just expecting her own mother to do that for her. Despite being an unmarried mother, Margaret must have continued to see John Anderson as, four years later, in 1915, Margaret gave birth to a sister for Meg, my own mum Helen Young Anderson. They had actually got married a few months before this event. It was what was termed an 'irregular' marriage, a marriage my declaration in front of two witnesses, a type of marriage legal in Scotland until 1940. So around this time, young Meg and her mother would have moved out of the Adams family home...