Roots, shoots and stories

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...

 I was not familiar with the term 'FAN Club' as used in a genealogical sense when I first came across it, so I had to resort to googling the term. I discovered that FAN can stand for 'Friends, Associates and Neighbours' and is yet another 'tool' that can be used in traditional family tree research to learn more about people and the lives that they led. Was this something I had previously used but just been ignorant of the term? Or was this something I could use to further my traditional research? The answer to both of these is yes! Traditional genealogy relies on building out a family tree using information from credible sources/documentation. For example, amongst other things,  a Scottish birth record will list the names of both parents  (if known) and possibly even their date of marriage, a marriage certificate will give the names of the bride and groom's parents and their occupations and whether or not they are still alive, a death certificate will give t...

 My mum, Helen Young Anderson, and dad, John McAra, got married on the 17th of October 1940 at 17 Netherton Road, Wishaw, Helen's parents' house and her home at that time. This was, of course, during World War 2. John, being a civil engineer, was in a 'reserved occupation' and as such was exempt from military service. However, at the time of their marriage, John was working away from his hometown of Cleland, Lanarkshire and living in 'digs' in Hayes, Middlesex. Helen joined him there after their marriage. After the war ended they returned to Wishaw. Marriage certificate of John and Helen The photo below shows the wedding party - bride and groom, best man and bridesmaid. The best man was John's brother, George McAra and the bridesmaid was Helen's younger sister Ann Anderson. When you think of weddings taking place in wartime, you don't imagine the wedding party being dressed up. But as you can see, they all were very smartly dressed. Note the men even...

 John Bradfute was born in 1763 at Dunsyre in South Lanarkshire, the second son of the Church of Scotland minister, the Rev. James Bradfute, and grandson of my 5 x great grandfather, also Rev. James Bradfute (1680-1758). As a second son, it is unlikely that John was going to follow his father, grandfather and great grandfather before him into the ministry. His elder brother, James, indeed did so, becoming an ordained priest in the Church of England in 1786. James had been a Deacon at Rose Castle in Cumbria before becoming a priest at Auckland Castle in County Durham. John, however, chose a different path.  At the age of 18, John became apprenticed to Edinburgh printer, Alexander Kincaid. Nine years later, he was taken as a partner into the printing and bookseller business by his mother's brother, John Bell (also son of a minister). John Bell had himself once been at apprentice to Kincaid, but had started up in business by himself in 1771. So it was in 1789 that John Bradfute b...

One set of my paternal  2 x great grandparents cause me somewhat of a headache!  The paper trail from my great grandmother Mary Boag, shows her parents were William Boag and Sarah Diamond. William was a cotton spinner and at the time of Mary's birth in 1829, the family were living in Eaglesham. By 1838, the couple had had ten children. They had been married in Glasgow by an independent minister - William was a Protestant and Sarah an Irish Catholic. All seems normal in 1841. The family are living in Eaglesham, the two eldest sons have followed their father into the cotton spinning trade, a couple of children are no longer there - possibly have died. But by the time of the next census in 1851, William is no longer in Eaglesham and no longer with Sarah. He is living in Glasgow, no longer a cotton spinner but a 'light porter' and there is a new spouse, a Margaret Muir, who was born in Eaglesham and a 9 month old son, Joseph. Obviously there was initially some doubt that this w...

 My dad was the youngest of the eleven children over 26 years that my grandmother Christina Walker had. Her three eldest died in infanthood/childhood. However, by the time my dad was born, he had siblings ranging from age 4 through to 21. The McAra family in 1914 - my dad is the baby, Mary (Poll) is back row on the left. Having grown up myself not close to my sister who was 13 years older than me, I cannot imagine that he had close relationships with all his siblings, but maybe with him being 'the baby' things were different. His eldest sister Mary, known as Polly or Poll, was still living in the family home when my dad was born, but the following year, she moved out when she married William Clinton, a miner. The couple were not married in their home parish of Shotts, but at Calton in Glasgow by a sheriff's warrant.  A marriage by a sheriff's warrant in Scotland was usually a way to register an 'irregular' marriage (the couple having lived together or having a c...

My direct ancestors on both sides of my family mainly stayed in the area of Scotland where they were born. Those that did move away tended not to move too far, staying in the neighbouring parishes or counties. However, their siblings tended to be more adventurous! The exceptions to this are my two Irish ancestors - a 2 x great grandmother and a 3 x great grandmother, about whom I've written before, (see  Irish ancestors ), my 3 x great grandfather Joseph Gregory who moved from England to Scotland, and those who moved temporarily for work from Scotland to England like my great grandfather, John McAra (1827-1910) John McAra was an iron puddler by trade and shortly after he was married he moved, presumably with his wife, and spent the best part of ten years working down in Durham in the north of England in the iron and steel industry there, before moving back to where he he was born in Lanarkshire. His two daughters were born in Durham and his one surviving son, my grandfather, was bo...

 The topic 'Overlooked' is a strange one. How do you know who you have overlooked??? There will certainly be occasions when I have overlooked a certain record, maybe because I was looking for the wrong name or in the wrong place or even made a typo in the search parameters, but how do you know if you have overlooked a person? So I am going to treat this topic by looking at a set of great grandparents that I have largely ignored - yes, I have their relevant dates and family, but do I have their 'story'? Have I stopped to think at all about the life they led? I don't think I have. So here's what I can put together. My mum's maternal grandparents were James Adams and Margaret Keir. James was born in 1850 in Carfin, Lanarkshire, Scotland, the only surviving son of a coalminer, though he had two elder sisters. At age 11 he was following in his father's footsteps down the mine as can be seen in the 1861 census. 1861 Census for James Adams   Source: Scotlands P...

 When I first started researching my family tree it was early in the 1980s. My dad was still alive, so I remember asking him to tell me about his siblings and parents.  I knew he had been the youngest in the family. At that time, I also knew he had two living sisters, Agnes and Jean, two living brothers, Will and George and had a sister who had died, Mary (Polly). It was only then that he told me he had had other siblings - other six in fact, four of which he had never known, and two who had died as adults. My dad had never spoken about them to me before. Nor had he spoken to me about his parents - his dad had died many years before I was born and his mum had died when I was only three. So that was starting point, to fill in a family tree with any information I could find about those grandparents and my dad's siblings. Of course, it was much harder then than it is nowadays to find records. Firstly you had to physically go to the registry office - in my case, New Register House...

 My grandmother Christina Walker and her husband John McAra had twelve children together during their 59 years of married life. Her first three children did not survive childhood - her firstborn, John, died aged 8 in 1896, her two next born had preceded him, just infants, in 1890 and 1893. Another daughter, Christina, was to die aged only 6 months in 1900. Such a lot of grief for a couple to go through. Losing children was still all too common around this time, but that doesn't make it any the less traumatic. And yet she was to find the compassion to help a child who was not her own. Christina Walker herself was the second youngest of eleven children. She had married John McAra at the age of 18 in 1887 and her first child was born nine months later. When the baby was just six months old, John was unwell and the young family had to apply for money from the Parish under the Poor Law. Her second child was born early in 1890 and died later on that same year. Meanwhile, her older sister...

The topic of 'random' sent me back looking into my tree for a woman I had come across who had a connection I never would have expected to find in my family tree, a tree  which is full of Central Lowland Scots, Irish and a scattering of English people. The woman in question was Effie Hanchett, a lady born in 1870 in Plymouth, Nebraska, USA. I had come across Effie when I was researching my maternal Adams line. Effie had married a William Henry Adams in Fairbury, Nebraska in 1893 and William is my first cousin three times removed. William's grandfather was my 3 x great grandfather.  Effie Hanchett (1870-1848) Source: shared on Ancestry.com In 1872, William, aged 8 and his younger sister had emigrated from Lanarkshire in Scotland with their parents, William and Marion, to start a new life in America. His father William was a coalminer like many Scots who emigrated at that time and he continued that job when they got to Illinois as can be seen in the 1880 census for La Salle, I...

 Margaret Annie Jean Reid Macmillan, my 'colourful' Aunt Margaret, was born in 1914 in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire to Robert Macmillan, a master plumber from Lanarkshire and his wife, Mary Matheson, a farmer's daughter from the Island of Skye. Margaret was the only daughter, though she did have two elder brothers. Census records show that the family were still living in Grangemouth in 1921 and at this time they also had a boarder lodging with them, a young Norwegian man. Whether he was the Macmillan's first boarder I do not know, but sometime between 1921 and 1930, the family moved to Glasgow, where the Macmillans opened a boarding house in the West End. Margaret and her mother Mary. Source: family photo  In 1935,  still living in her parents' boarding house, Margaret, then aged 21 and working in a shoe store, married George McAra, my father's brother. From this point onwards until George retired, they lived at Sunnyside, a lovely stone built cottage in Cleland, ...

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however,  the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...

 The two great-great grandmothers that I know the least about are my two Irish great-grandmothers, one paternal and one maternal, Sarah Diamond and Jane Chambers. That is not surprising since Irish records can be difficult to research and to find. So what do I know of them and what information am I missing? Sarah first appears when she marries my 2 x great grandfather, William Boag in Glasgow in 1819. Both were working in the textile industry. Source: Scotlands People Their marriage in the Gorbals was conducted by an independent minister, the significance of which was lost on me at the time but became clearer once I started looking for the baptismal records of her children, whom I had found in the 1841 census for Eaglesham, where William was a cotton spinner. Although I could find her sons' baptisms in the Church of Scotland records, it was only when I checked the Catholic records that I found her daughters! That suggested that Sarah was an Irish Catholic and why her marriage to W...

My paternal line has been in Lanarkshire, Scotland, for the last two hundred years. The first of my McAra ancestors to arrive in Lanarkshire was my 2 x great grandfather, John McAra. He didn't come alone - some of his brothers also came to work in the iron foundries and later coal mines.  They had come through to the west from Cramond, a small but important industrial centre in the 18th and 19th centuries on the River Almond just outside Edinburgh. By 1799 Cramond had three iron forges and it was there that my McAra ancestors worked. On my first visit through to Cramond, I naturally visited Cramond Church and its graveyard. There I found a large headstone with details of the McAra family. The first name on the headstone was that of my 3 x great uncle James McAra and the date of his death was given as 1811. Now, by this time I had found out a lot about James McAra and knew he most certainly did not die in 1811 - but 1811 was the year of his transportation to Tasmania for the unlawfu...

 I began researching my family tree in the 1980s. My mum and dad were both still alive and gave me the basic information I needed to get me started - their parents' and siblings names and rough dates of birth. It was only at that point did I find out my dad had had five elder siblings who had died and even my mum had had a younger brother who had died as a child. They had never come up in conversation before and were not talked about. In my dad's defence, three of his siblings had died before he was born, though the other two had died in their 20s-30s. My mum's young brother had died when she was 8 years old, but as I said, she had never spoken about him previous to my starting my research. So, armed with what little I knew, I started filling in the gaps - dates of birth/marriage/death and places associated with my close relatives. All the dates associated with the births and tragic deaths of my aunts and uncles. It was when I turned to my mum's siblings that a couple o...

On my 2 x great grandfather John Young's death certificate, his father is listed as James Young and his mother as a Helen Ravelton. John died at the age of 78 and was a widower. His son James was a witness on the death certificate and both of John's parents were marked as deceased. Ravelton is not a common name and therefore you would expect researching Helen in the Parish records to be relatively easy, even when you consider its various spellings - Ravelton/Revelton/Raveltoun. However, with names getting passed on down through families, mix-ups can occur and this is what has happened in Helen's case and has led to lots of trees having the wrong Helen, the wrong dates or the wrong parents. Many even have the wrong James Young as her husband! I myself have also made mistakes in researching her and her husband James Young - James Young is a very common name in this area and indeed throughout Scotland. In my case too, the Youngs and the Raveltons are also closely connected. It...

 The topic of  'Free Space' allowed me to write about anything or anyone I wanted. Where to start? I thought. After reading a previous blog, a friend asked me what happened to the descendants of  my 2 x ggf John McAra and his wife Elizabeth, (who was not my 2 x ggm). So I decided to look back over my research into John and the brothers of his, who had all moved through from Cramond in Midlothian to find work in the coal pits of Lanarkshire in the first half of the 19th century. I was only about halfway through my planned research on his children, when I came across another John McAra, coalminer, in the same town, Coatbridge. Who was he? So I entered the rabbit hole ... Turns out he was my John McAra's nephew, the son of his brother Thomas. I already had him on my tree, but I took another look to see if I could add in anymore information - shouldn't take me too long I thought. Of course, once you go down the rabbit hole there's no turning back. Before I knew where I ...