The town layout today isn’t so very different and, coincidentally, in The Vennel, one of the lanes snuggling behind the High Street, a cousin of mine has one of her florist shops.

The first name to jump off the page is a Tanner. William Law Jnr has a tannery in High Street.  This is almost certainly William Law, born in 1806, who is carrying on the family trade.  He described himself on his grandparents’ tombstone as feuer Glasgow & burgess here, apparently owning land in both Linlithgow and the expanding city of Glasgow. William’s grandfather married a Spence and his father a Stanners and these three families remain tightly interwoven in the burgh for over a hundred years. Also listed as tanners are Alex. Spence & Co and Robert Spence – both cousins to William. I wonder if his full name was kept for Sundays and to impress – did everyone know him instead as Willie or Wullie?

Further along the High Street there’s a watchmaker named William Law – this could be William of the older generation who married Elizabeth Stanners, drawing the families closer.

There are some surprises in the second column – two teachers called William Hastie and George Stanners.  To my knowledge, there weren’t any dominies in the family, but they were undoubtedly related to us in the wider sense.

The final column of Pigot’s entry is a fascinating glimpse into the travel infrastructure of nineteenth century Scotland. And among the carriers, plying their trade between Linlithgow and Edinburgh, is John Thom, who is a rather inglorious part of my family’s history.  A Stanners girl had two children by him but he was married to another woman all the while. I had understood that he was an exciseman – were the two occupations of carrier and exciseman compatible? Travelling from Linlithgow to the larger towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh was possible every lawful day (meaning Monday-Friday) although to catch the Passage Boat to Edinburgh involved getting up at cock craw, for the boat left at 4.15am.

The Hamilton Advertiser did publish a follow up story on 4 June about the 4 Robert Bensons.  I’m still waiting for a ‘hard copy’ of the paper to arrive (it’s not available where I am) but here’s the online link to the story.

Sadly, the paper put a link to this blog in the article and by the time it appeared, the site was down so the link was dead.  I don’t know if that cost me any vital contacts.  But they also published my phone number and two people made contact that way, which was just marvellous.

I’ll write more about this later – just wanted to get the notification about the newspaper story up quickly.

I love the edges of the copy which give a glimpse into 1933 Hamilton. Did the Hamilton Old Parish Church Girls’ Association enjoy their visit to the works? It sounds a wee bit dull, to be honest – inspecting a ruling machine in operation?

And look at those Entertainments. Green’s Playhouse, Renfield Street, Europe’s largest cinema, where none but the best talking pictures are shown.  That week’s films included If I Had a Million which tells what happens to eight otherwise unconnected people when they are picked out of the phone book by a dying multimillionaire and each endowed with a million dollars. I wonder if anyone in my photo went to the pictures to see it?

But it’s the very first Robert Benson who married a Spence. Or to be accurate, a Thom. And Margaret, the bride, was from a long line of burgesses in the Royal Burgh of Linlithgow.

When I began researching this family line, I discovered that I wasn’t alone – contacts flooded in with stacks of information.  Sadly, a lot of it turned out to be contradictory – and who to believe and why? Overwhelmed by the task, I set ‘the Linlithgow lot’ aside for a good while and only returned to it fairly recently. This time, I’ve done the research myself using (hopefully) ironclad sources.

The first surprise was one that’s all too common. This girl had the surname Thom but there was no marriage.  I thought of a commonlaw marriage but the truth was that an already married man – Mr Thom, the exciseman – fathered two children on Helen Stanners. That wife and six children I’d been following? Somebody else’s.

Having overcome that hurdle, I began to find the families of Stanners and Spence.  And they’re infinitely more interesting than an unfaithful exciseman.

Linlithgow is a town full of history.  Mary of Guise, wife of James V of Scotland, was delivered of a daughter here in 1542, who was to become the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots. Linlithgow Palace, which royal princes altered and improved through the years, was considered an architectural gem of the Renaissance. Prince Charles Edward Stewart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) stayed there in 1745, but after fires started by the Duke of Cumberland in 1746, the palace burned to the ground.  The ruins of it have lain unroofed and uninhabited since then.

The River Avon flowed through the town and was vital to the success of the leather industry which sprang up in the 1600s and continued for two centuries. My ancestors tanned the leather and made shoes from it for export. This brought them some reward, and there are several generations of both Stanners and Spences who were made burgesses of the town.

I’m still deep in the labrynth that is Scots history, but so far I’ve discovered that to be a burgess could mean several things.  It could simply be a man who owned some land (and that could be a very small amount of land, say enough to build a house on).  Or it could mean a man who was a member of a prestigious crafts guild, and there were certainly Guilds of Tanners and Cordiners. I think that at least some of my people will appear on Burgess Rolls, although the privilege of being a Burgess was also granted to those outside the burgh.  A case of profiting by who you know.

It was a thing to be proud of, being a burgess, and this is illustrated by a rather grand tombstone in the kirkyard which was erected by one William Law in honour of his grandparents, George Stanners and Margaret Spence.  William was himself a ‘feur of Glasgow & burgess here’.

I’m beginning to look at extracts from the commisary courts whose records are kept in the National Archives of Scotland and I found  Charles Inglis vs George Stanners in January of 1769.  The commisary courts were often concerned with moral matters as well as matters of money, and I will have to look at the full record to find out why Mr Inglis and Mr Stanners were facing each other in court. I’m also going to look into the system of apprenticeships – there were two George Stanners, father and son – could George Jnr have been apprenticed to his father?

These families probably owned little pockets of land on Linlithgow’s High Street and there is a record of a William Law in his shoe shop in the 1820s.  I think it’s a fair bet that he was a descendant of the man who erected a monument to his grandparents.

Finally, looking into these families has also been an exploration into random spelling. Elizabeth Dow, whose father was James Dove.  And Christian Cochran who was variously Christian or Christean and Cochran or Chochren or even Chochran. The Georges get off lightly, only once being spelled, rather Germanically, Georg.

Edit: Thanks to some fantastic help from Angela at the Reference Library in Hamilton, I now know that this picture, captioned ‘The Four Robert Bensons‘, appeared in the Hamilton Advertiser for 13 May 1933. There wasn’t a story as such, just details of who the men in the photo were. Someday I’ll go and look at the original page in the newspaper. 

The eldest Robert – he of the luxuriant mouser – was 82 here and had outlived two wives, Euphemia Baxter and Agnes Craig.  He and Euphemia had 7 children, all boys. This accounts for the masses (and I do mean masses!) of  Bensons who followed.  Had it not already been a common name in the west of Scotland, Robert’s contribution must have ensured that it became so.

The last of the Bensons to be born in Linlithgow, his father was the first to be named Robert. The male line was vigorous, most of them living into their 80s – the same, alas, can’t be said for their poor wives! According to my mother (who was 17 when her great-grandfather died) Robert Senior was to be approached with caution. As he’s glowering in every photo I have of him, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. He looks trim of figure and rather nattily dressed.  I imagine him flinging open the bedroom window to do his callisthenics then shouting to his daughter-in-law ‘Nell!  Have my best breeks got a good crease in them? The man frae the Hamilton Advertiser’s coming today.’

The next generation is the craggy-faced gentleman on the left, aged 61. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was a colliery engine keeper at the pit. This Robert married a gentle Irish girl called Nell Wilson on Christmas Day in 1896. (Churches don’t do marriages on Christmas Day anymore, do they?) My mother spoke warmly of her grandparents, although Robert was typically brusque in the way of his generation. Oddly though, Mother never told me that Nell was Irish – I had to find that out for myself and I haven’t a birth certificate for her.

This Robert Benson had a relatively small family – two daughters Rachel and Euphemia and one son, yes you guessed, Robert. Rachel was known as Retta and I wonder if she was always content with that version – as a Rachel, I must say I would have hated it. Euphemia was of course Effie – my wonderfully characterful great-aunt whose wedding picture graces the front of this blog. Everyone in this photo also features in that wedding picture, including the wee boy (as a baby) on his mother’s knee to the left of the front row.

Son Robert (who’s the youngest man in the picture) was named with plenty of reminders of the family’s history.  He was Robert Spence Thom Benson.  Individuals with multiple names are a godsend in genealogy, with an instant link back through the generations.  My Aunt Effie gloried in hers and signed Euphemia Gibb Baxter Benson with a flourish.  Robert was my mother’s ‘Uncle Bob’ . He and his wife Barbara were apparently cheerful folk in contrast to the dourness of some of the Bensons – maybe Barbara was responsible for that.

The little boy, the youngest Robert Benson, is aged about 8 here and was instructed to sit on his great-grandfather’s chair.  He protested vehemently and with tears, but was told sharply to obey by the old man.  You can see just how uncomfortable the poor thing is by the way he perches – close but not close. In my mind, this boy is always ‘Cousin Bobby’ but he’s actually my mother’s cousin, not mine. He got his share of family names too – Baxter & Hunter (his mother’s maiden name). He would, in his turn, live at Retta Cottage.

Three piece suits were still required dress for formal occasions, complete with breast-pocket hankies (a patterned one in the case of the young man). This family were never, to my knowledge, poor enough to suffer the ignominy of wearing your best suit to church on a Sunday then pawning it on Monday morning till the next week.  The old man’s suit was built to last – the waistcoast is cut high at the neck in the old style. His grandson wears a suit with a bit of a check in it and what looks like a striped shirt (but still with detachable white celluloid collar). The two older men are both wearing fob watches in their waistcoats – these would be handed down through the generations. The youngest man’s hairstyle looks almost modern, and his son’s locks look to have been tamed by Brylcreem.

I suspect there’s somebody of my generation (and maybe even beyond) bearing the name Robert Benson. I rather hope that the name does survive, continuing a tradition which began almost two hundred years ago.

Edit – And here’s my great-grandmother Nell (wife of the chap on the left) standing outside the front of Retta Cottage.  I think this picture must have been taken the same day.

I picked it for two reasons – one, it’s got loads of relatives in it and two, I could easily make the image the right size (albeit at the expense of the poor folk at the back, who have had their heads chopped off!).

I’ll introduce you to all of them later, but I’ll just say it’s a June day in 1924. The place is round the back of the Masonic Hall in Cadzow Street.  The bride is Effie Benson and her groom Tom Wilson. And there, on her mother’s knee (front row, third from the right) is my mother, all of two months old. The old chap with the big mouser and his customary glower (far right of the second front row) is her great-grandfather.

It’s a studio portrait from the 1930s and he’s wearing his best tweed bunnet and watch chain.  With him is his dog, whose name was Rover. I see that Rover is wearing not only a collar but what looks like an identity disc. I don’t know what occasioned the visit to the photographer in Hamilton and why he took the dog with him rather than his wife!  Great-great-grandfather was apparently very fierce and nearly always scowled in photos – at least in this one,  that splendid white mouser isn’t bristling too much.

Footnote This post first appeared in curlsdiva.com on May 7, 2009, before folkarethething.com existed. I’m transferring all genealogically related posts from that blog to this.