Tell me it’s not true

Today I’m in that least enviable of positions for a family historian – I suspect that I’ve been following the wrong family and that great-great-great-grandfather Cowan was somebody else.  [Silent Scream]

His parents lost several of their children and later children were given the same name.  So there’s two Marys, two Thomases and, crucially for me, two Williams. The second William only came to light yesterday (born in 1778) and wouldn’t have been a problem except he was born two years after my William.  That would indicate that the first child called William died in infancy and the next boy child took the name.  Unfortunately, my William is the first child and I have records of him living until 1852. [Sigh]

These Cowans lived in a Stirlingshire village called Airth from the 18th through to the 19th centuries, when the population was no more than 800.  But it looks like there were at least four Cowan families there and the list of names they called their children is depressingly small.  The boys were invariably William, John, James & Thomas and the girls Mary, Janet, Agnes and Margaret.  Child mortality was appallingly high among these millworkers and miners – I found 34 Cowan deaths in a twelve year period, and I’m betting that most of those were children. Death records for the 1700s of course often don’t tell you what age the person was when they died or who they were related to.  Looking at one page of a kirk record book earlier today, I saw one poor soul recorded only as ‘Baine – died, an old woman’.

So I’ve a William who might or might not be the son of James & Margaret. But he might have been the second William, not the first.  In which case, did he have the son – you guessed it, William! – that I think he had, who was born in 1806 or am I following entirely the wrong line?

This branch of the family has been frustrating from the outset.  Every scrap of information I have on Cowans has been hard won and it remains the sparsest branch on the whole tree. It’s almost as if the ghost of my father – who hated that I wanted to look back at his family – is jinxing me! And it’s doubly frustrating because it’s the surname that I bear.  Of course I relate to the other names on the family tree, but your own surname is always special.

Right -  back to the battering ram of intensive searching, eyes glazing over at the sight of another generation of James, John and Williams. [Gritted Teeth]

Photo Falkirk Local Historical Society