Jun 26th, 2009

How is a village made?

I’ve been homing in on a village in Lanarkshire where four generations of my Somerville ancestors lived.

As it was a small village (around 500 people in the 1850s and possibly less than that in earlier centuries), it’s possible to get a fair overall view of who lived there and how the village families were inter-related.  I did a blanket search for Somerville BMDs 1538-1854 in the Old Parish Records on scotlandspeople and came to the conclusion that this family (or families) must have made up a majority of the population for nigh on two centuries. The records, by the way,  date back to a little before the Scottish Reformation and end as national registration takes over from the parish records.

As for women marrying (more…)

May 23rd, 2009

The footie 1898 style

This photographic card is in very bad condition. I put it in a flickr photo restoration group once and Eric Dege did the most wonderful job on it. Stupidly, I took it off my flickr photostream, have not kept it on my hard drive and so it’s lost.

Anyway, here’s a Scottish boys’  football team from around 1898. My grandfather, John (Jack) Somerville is the boy seated at the far right, aged around 10. The specialist kit comprised a striped jumper, knickerbockers and big boots- how would today’s footballers cope with that?  I imagine that this was a school team and they supplied the football strip. None of these boys’ families would have been well-off enough to afford it. In Jack’s case, he came from a single parent household (the redoubtable Betsy).  (See Betsy’s story here)

There are only 10 boys, one short of a team – I wonder if somebody didn’t turn up on the day they were due to have their photo taken?

May 20th, 2009

Betsy’s story

Betsy Somerville was my great-grandmother on my mother’s side. She was one of the first people I was to find in my hunt for family – and one of the few whose story I could share with my mother before she died.

I don’t know what Betsy looked like – there are no photos of her. And it’s no good looking at pictures of her children, for they are very dissimilar.  And that’s because – there’s no other way of putting this – Betsy was a bit of a sucker for the men.

When Elizabeth Somerville was born in 1852, she was the ninth of eleven children born to John Somerville and Jean Wallace.  John’s quite an important figure in my Somerville history, and I’ll be coming back to him later. A number of villages clustered around Lanark then and the family moved back and forth between them. Carstairs, Carluke and Cambusnethan. They were part of a generation caught up in Scotland’s inexorable slide from agriculture to industry.  John’s father had worked the land, but by the time John was grown, he was toiling in the coalfields of Lanarkshire as a winding engineman.

In the 1861 census for Cambusnethan, there’s seven of them living in one room. Betsy and her two younger sisters are recorded as scholars.  This should have meant that they attended school on a regular basis.  However, parents were often wary of officials and would say that their children went to school when in reality they didn’t.

By the 1870s, Betsy had lost four of her brothers and sisters to consumption, a disease which spread like wildfire in the overcrowded (more…)