Sadly, there was precious little of my families.  They were obviously too poor to have afforded headstones. I thought I might spend a little time hunting down lair records.  Because, although I have burial records for a few in the Old Parish Records, there’s precious little information there.  Finding a William Somerville, he could be one of five or six – which Somerville family did he belong to?

Back in the 1980s, I first started looking at my family’s history in a random fashion.  One of the things I did (I had access to a car, which makes all the difference) was to visit graveyards. Once, somewhere in Lanarkshire (I don’t remember where) I met the graveyard attendant, who showed me the original lair books dating back to 1700.  I noted the relevant numbers and he showed me where they were in the cemetery, for these were all without headstones. In Cambusnethan, I met the local minister who sat me down with a cup of tea and a piece of cake while he unearthed volume after volume of local records from his bookshelves.

I drifted away from genealogy in the ’90s and so didn’t realise what drastic changes were being made to  historic records at parish and local council level.  When I came back to some serious research, it was to find that parish churches no longer held any records and that millions of local council records had been destroyed. Some bureaucratic historian (or more likely, a committee of bureacratic historians) had decided that in order to preserve these precious records, they must be collected in national archives.  The argument was that they could be preserved  in the correct atmospheric conditions so precious papers would decay no further and that digitisation was the way forward for many records.  Decisions were also made about what was deemed valuable enough to save, for even a national archive could only hold so much.

Bureacrats through the ages have always been keen on the idea of centralisation and integration. Give the power to one central body rather than a hundred disparate local bodies. Much more efficient. Local councils can be pettyfogging and caught up in too much detail. All of that is true of course.

But – and it’s an enormous but – local bureacracy is the kind that painstakingly records the number of nails required for the church door and who came before the local magistrate for felling his neighbour’s apple tree. Local officials take pride in their kirkyards and their history. And they’re part of a local network who share community interests.

Don’t get me wrong, the National Archives of Scotland and the General Record Office for Scotland are impressive organisations.  Awe inspiring repositories and guardians of the documents which shaped Scotland’s history. All kept in perfect climatic conditions and available to view digitally. Much of it is the history of politicians, landowners and great lords.  The makers and shakers of a country’s history.

I know that if records had stayed at local council and parish level, the fabric of them would have deteriorated year on year.  Mould, mice and human sweat would eventually have crumbled the paper into dust.  But how rapid would that have been? We accept current wisdom which says that this piece of paper, if unpreserved, won’t last 50 years.  Yet 20 years ago, I turned the pages of a book that had been continually used for 200 years in a quiet parish church.  The ink had faded a little but its local custodians knew that it should be kept out of sunlight and away from damp and opened only when a new event was recorded or a record checked. It was in reverent and good hands.

Natural catastrophes have of course robbed us of some vital documents – fire, flood and conflict all took their toll.  Isn’t it better therefore to take those documents away so they’ll never again have to risk such catastrophes? Maybe.

We live in a technological age and we’re proud that our technology can preserve our history and display it to the world with such precision. But technology is a sea of shifting sand – the definitive method of preservation will change every few years. And technology factors out the human touch – literally. The records of my ancestors are too precious now to have a human hand upon them, but look how accurately they can be reproduced on a screen.

A computer screen is equivalent to the ‘preserved in aspic’ recipe.  It looks pretty, it’ll last forever (or will it?) but you can’t smell the smell of ages, feel the texture of leather bookcovers or experience the weight of a folio as you lift it from a shelf.

Reading a record in a central archive reading room, where computers gently hum and voices are hushed, is still a thrilling experience.  But it’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to being in the vestry of a church where generations of your ancestors worshipped, opening a large, shabby volume and seeing your great-great-great grandfather’s name written down in the Kirk Session records by the parish clerk. Then wandering around the village kirkyard which has known the footsteps of those whose blood runs in your veins. Maybe meeting somebody in the shop whose name is one of your surnames, a living link.

You know, the records of the past are our past. The folk whose lives are recorded there are our folk.  Why should we have to go to a centralised archive far from where we and they lived to look at those records? Do we know without any doubt that digitalised records will still be accessible and viable in fifty years? No we don’t. Who decided that taking community records out of the community was a good idea? Was it anyone who actually lived in the community or was it a big-city person with big-city ideas? Why wasn’t money given to local custodians who had a personal and passionate connection with their community so they could preserve and conserve the history of that community?

I spent a couple of hours chasing the lair records of one village. The local council only had records from 1926 and they referred me to the Church of Scotland.  The Church (rather loftily and impatiently) told me that they didn’t have the climate conditions necessary to keep such records and that all such records were now in the National Archives of Scotland.

The NAS told me that although burial records have been digitised where they exist, lair records have not been kept. It was suggested to me that there wasn’t anything significant to be found in lair records if you already had a record of burial.  That’s short-sighted archival thinking, not the thinking of a social or family historian. Among Cowans, I found my grandfather’s sister, believed to be buried elsewhere, interred in my grandparents’ lair. There was also an unrecorded baby daughter.  Among Somervilles, I found a family lair containing three generations whose names had been unknown up to then.  Lair records can fill in gaps and add intriguing details to a family’s story.

Preserve our history by all means, but don’t sterilise it, don’t make us view it from behind a screen or only with white gloves.  And give local custodians their rightful place at the centre of their community’s record keeping, don’t have it looked after in some huge archive where the faint footsteps of the common people are eclipsed by the grand event.

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 into the family, I  tracked the surnames of  my great (x3, x4 & x5) grandmothers – Janet Graham, Janet Lewars & Agnus Fisher.  And yesterday I made a list of every other surname that connects to Somerville.  Forty names in all.  I then searched for births 1538-1854 for each name.

There was nothing before 1689 and it looked as if the village sprang into life in the space of those four years between 1689 and 1693. There were eight family names, including mine,  who had more than 20 babies born in those years.  Gibson family births (I have a Grizel Gibson marrying a Somerville) for 1689-1854 numbered 126 and there were 178 Smiths from 1691. These families must have represented a significant presence in the village for a hundred and fifty years (roughly 5 or 6 generations), long after my Somervilles had moved on.

Other early families (again those with more than 20 births for those four years) were Dickson, Thomson, Young, Brown and of course Somerville.

However, the picture painted by these online records can be misleading. In my families there were about four times as many births as deaths recorded.  Registering a child’s birth wasn’t compulsory in the 1690s but when it was done (often when the child was only a few days old), it was the date of baptism.  The fledgeling Church of Scotland would have been a powerful influence on those god-fearing families.

Very few deaths were registered as such and usually were noted only when mortcloth dues or the fee for the tolling of a bell for the departed were paid.  The poorer villagers would have had neither of these rites to see them to their graves – instead, only a rough shroud and an unmarked plot in the burial ground.

The other factor that can mislead is something I hadn’t considered.  There’s evidence to suggest that the village’s parish church (still standing today although without its own minister) was constructed on an ancient site dating back at least to the reign of David I of Scotland (1083-1153).  But the church in which my ancestors worshipped was largely built during the 18th century, with a belfry whose bell is stamped with the date 1692. Accordingly, the kirk records date from 1689.

I’m going to try to look at the Kirk Session records which are held at the National Archives of Scotland, who I spoke to today. There are 18 volumes over a 150 year period.  Unfortunately, the originals are too fragile to be handled so what I’ll get to look at is a high definition digitised copy. Included in those records will be some if not all of the  BMDs as well as parish accounts and other church matters.  In those days,  the church expounded on moral matters and the local Commisary Courts on matters legal.

These documents aren’t going to be easy and it will be slow going – it’s not for nothing that the Archives have a pamphlet called ‘How to read early Scottish handwriting’.

What’s next is to find when the village actually came into existence.  The kirk records begin in 1689, but there may well be other records which take me further back into history.  I hope there are. The Somerville name goes back, I know, to a generation after the Norman Conquest when one William de Somerville was granted lands in Lanarkshire. A great proportion of his descendants and the descendants of his peasants remained in the heartland around Carnwath and are there today.

Not content with finding my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Samuel Somervel there in the village in the 1670s, I’d love to find more of these Somervilles whose name originated in a small town near Caen in Normandy.

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?

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 conditions. Three more had settled down and married. But Betsy remained single. Then, in 1879, she had a child who was named for his father, James Morris.  He’s a mystery to me is James Snr – all I know of him is that although he gave the boy his name, he and Betsy never married.

Now with a baby son to look after, Betsy moved in and kept house for her widowed father in Cambusnethan, her mother having died three years earlier. Nine years passed and in 1888, she was living in what was to be the first of several addresses in Blantyre.  Her father was slowly, agonisingly dying.  And Betsy was pregnant again.

John, her second son (who would be my grandfather) was born on the 18th of August and Betsy’s father died only a month later.  I think it’s significant that Betsy didn’t register the birth of the baby until after her father had died.

My grandfather’s birth certificate was the first document I ever saw.  It was at the Public Record Office in Edinburgh in pre-computer days.  You had to look up the indices, then place your requests to view (written in pencil – no pens were allowed anywhere in the records office)in a little box.  Then you waited.  Eventually, a wee man in a warehouseman’s coat would lead you up to the stacks high in the dome of the beautiful Georgian building. Placing the relevant volume on a rickety ledge, he’d find the correct page and stand aside while you copied the record. It was rather thrilling and I rather regret that this hands-on experience has vanished.

Copying John Somerville’s birth record, I saw a note scribbled to the side of the record. It said ‘Entry in Register of Corrected Entries’ and I asked my guide what that was.  He grinned knowingly, said ‘Aye…come wi’ me’ and led me off to a separate section of the stacks.

What I found in that record left me full of admiration for Betsy Somerville. Not only was she supporting herself by working  as a boot merchant on her own account, she had decided to take baby John’s natural father to court to prove paternity. This was an enormous undertaking for a working class woman on her own.  The case was heard in the Sherriff Court on the 10th of November and George Dick, a surface worker at the coal pit from Ayrshire, was decreed to be the father.  There was no question of money changing hands for the upkeep of the child – George Dick wouldn’t have had any – just a question of honour. And perhaps a healthy dose of rage – had George tried to wash his hands of her and the baby?

George doesn’t appear again in this story, but I traced him in a census three years later. He’s married to one Agnes McCallum – they have no children and are living not far away from Betsy and her boys. And that’s the last we hear of George Dick – or is it?

Fast forward to 1890. Betsy’s now 38. And there’s another baby. Another son. She’s officially a ‘laundress’ – in other words, she’s taking in folk’s washing.  Back breaking work but she had little alternative as a single mother with young children.  And the name of this new son? George.

Let’s look at the evidence. George Dick is married in 1891, but Betsy’s George is born in November of 1890. No father’s name appears on his birth certificate and there’s to be no taking to court of any man this time.

The final twist is that on the night of the 1901 census, she’s living at yet another address and she has a visitor. George Livingstone, a 29 year old (married) painter from Rothesay.  Too young for her? Perhaps – after all, she’s 46 in 1901. But let’s remember that when she had her second boy, John, she was 39 but the father was only 24. A penchant for younger men? I’ll never know.

Most of John Somerville and Jean Wallace’s children were buried with them in a family grave which I’ve visited at Cambusnethan.  But Betsy isn’t with them.  Her eldest son, James (my great-uncle Jim, who I knew briefly as a little girl) bought a plot for himself and his wife – and there was room for his mother.

I wonder if Betsy kept in touch with her brothers and sisters throughout her life, or whether she was ostracised by the family.   If her behaviour was frowned upon, did caring for her ailing father make up for it a bit? Was she then looked on more kindly?  I really hope that was the case.

For I’ve a deep fondness for Betsy Somerville, my great-grandmother. She had her weaknesses, plain to see, but by god she paid for them.  She never married and her poverty must have been considerable. But she kept her family together somehow until they were men. That took courage and resilience. In some ways, she was a very modern woman.