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.

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

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.

I’ve never used anything except a local note.  All my notes about a person are piled onto their individual record.  Noting a source in correct format depends on how logical I was feeling the day I made the note.  They range from Birth: found on 13 June 2009 at scotlandspeople online, GROS numbers incl (pat on the back there) to the cryptic J 09 online (worse than useless). I’ve also got what might be called personality notes such as Aunty Betty used to throw humbugs at her sister when they were 98 and 93 respectively.

Then there’s what I’ll grandly call research notes. Some of these are aide-memoires so that I don’t forget I’ve already tried a particular search route – don’t search 1750 Pettinain again – he’s not there, you idiot. That’s as bad as getting  to page 152 of a book and realising you’ve read it before.  Some are me playing Sherlock Holmes if John wasn’t her real father, the censuses show Fred the butcher visiting – does this mean that Mabel is Fred’s lovechild? Yet others are pure rants I’ve looked everywhere for this bloody family – how can seven children, two parents and a grandma vanish into thin air?

The problem with research notes is that it’s like being on a cruise ship – the view’s always changing. Out of superstition (in my head I say I’m just being careful) I keep the note from 2005 complaining about Aunty Mamie’s marriage not being in the records after 1854 but I also keep the one  (2008) that proclaims enthusiastically today found Auntie Mamie’s marriage in 1845 – who’d have thought it – her husband was Lionel Higginbottom & they had nine little Higginbottoms!

I don’t think there’s a cure for my slapdash ways.  If anyone ever reads my gedcom file now or in the future, they’ll have to put up with my eccentricities. And maybe, in the individual record that is RIP RC, there will be a note written by the descendent Rachel made this file, but what a £*&$%)($(* mess it is!

Photo by net efekt

But first to the roots of it.

A blacksmith named William Selfridge of County Derry in Ireland had a son Henry who came to Scotland as a young man and married a Scottish girl, Margaret Elder. They lived in Hamilton and had nine children, the youngest of whom was Hannah Elder Selfridge, born in 1893.  This was my Great-Aunt Hannah. In 1911, she married Joseph Higgins.

It’s very likely that the Higgins line came originally from Ireland too, although I have little information on this at the moment.  Joseph was in the middle of a family of twelve and his elder sister, just two years older, was my grandmother, Martha Robertson Higgins.

Joe and Hannah lived in Hamilton till the middle of World War I and daughters Peggy and Martha were born there, along with their first son, Joseph, who died as a baby. I don’t know yet why they moved out of Lanarkshire and down to the coast to a small fishing town called Girvan. If it was for the healthy seaside air, it must have been a cruel irony when the first child to be born there, Henry (Harry) died of bronchitis as a toddler.

The next two children, both boys, were named for their dead siblings.  This seems morbid to us now but was quite common in those days.  So – another Joe and another Harry.  The three youngest – Hannah, Eddie and Agnes – completed the family.

The children grew up in a tenement block called Ailsa Buildings named after the great rock Ailsa Craig which dominates the horizon of that part of the Ayrshire coast.

They probably moved to Kirkwood Place just after the end of World War II, when all but two of the children had married and moved away.  Harry, the second unlucky holder of that name, had been killed in 1944 clearing mines on Whitby beach, but Joe was safe and sound and married to Duffus.  They would later move to Nottinghamshire in England (England seemed a lot further away in those days than it is now!) The two youngest girls, Hannah and Agnes, remained single and lived with their parents at Carlton Cottage in Kirkwood Place.

Eddie, the youngest son, lived nearby with wife Agnes (always referred to as ‘Eddie’s Agnes’ to differentiate her from his sister Agnes) and children Helen and Joe.

People called Joe in this branch of my family are almost as numerous as Roberts in my Benson clan. There was Old Uncle Joe (whose grandfather was the Irish blacksmith), Joe that died as a baby, Joe that married Duffus and went to England, Peggy’s Joe (confusingly, often called Young Joe although his surname was Fulton, not Higgins), and Young Joe (Eddie’s son).

For me, there was Old Aunt Hannah and Young Aunt Hannah. And when we visited, people referred to Tom’s Helen (my mother) and Helen Higgins (Eddie’s daughter).

This is the family around 1950. Back: Peggy, Joe, Harry (a space was left for this brother who died in 1944 and an image of him inserted by the photographer), Eddie & Martha. Front: Hannah, Joe (Snr), Hannah (Snr) and Agnes.

The house was a four square stone affair with low front walls (perfect for an excited child to jump over as she raced to the beach) and was one block up from the sea front. It was surrounded by paths and sat in its own small patch of land.  Next door were tenement blocks, where the McCrindles lived, who had a pigeon loft much visited by Old Uncle Joe and my dad.

I think my parents were very close to Old Uncle Joe – my dad lost his father to a pit accident while he was just a wee boy and Old Uncle Joe (his father’s brother-in-law) must have seemed like a father figure to him.  He was one of the first people my mother told when she knew she was going to have me.  He knew how much she longed for another child but sadly died a few months before I was born, so I never knew him.

The front door of the house was never used by the family – a blue back door coming straight into the scullery lay permanently unlocked and people came and went at will.  Joe Fulton (Peggy’s Joe)  planted and tended the garden and was especially proud of his Ayrshire potato crop.  He was a handsome young man whose wife Molly was seamlessly integrated into the extended Higgins family.  I’ve been chasing after the taste of those potatoes ever since! Eddie, a plasterer to trade, could turn his hand to most things practical and was always on hand if anything needed fixing at his parents’ house. As a shy child from a quiet family, the garrulous and easy-going Higginses were a revelation to me.  Eddie was a broad man with a terrific twinkle in his eye who could tease me into giggles.

When Old Uncle Joe died in 1954, the spills to light his pipe with stayed by the fireside and Old Aunt Hannah took over his chair there, always at the heart of the house. For me, she was a small round white haired figure with a  kind expression.  Kissing her before I went to bed was a softly whiskery experience.

Girvan was a popular destination for Glasgow holidaymakers and the two front rooms of the house were let out in the summer.  When they weren’t booked, we made the trip from Fife and stayed in those rooms, my much loved dog, Zona, sleeping beside my put-you-up bed.

In 1964, Old Aunt Hannah died and my aunts Hannah and Agnes, the two unmarried sisters, became the heart of the family.  Agnes was always the baby of the family and Hannah, a bus conductress, was the perfect housekeeper.  They both knitted but Hannah had the edge, knitting complicated designs without a pattern while listening to the radio and drinking a cuppa.  I still have a sweater with blue reindeer on it which she knitted for me. The two sisters were bingo fiends, an activity which seemed alien and glamorous to me.

Aunt Hannah was one of my favourite people in all the world. Her voice had a slight rasp to it because of the chain-smoking in which she indulged and she couldn’t be beaten at card games.  Gin rummy was the game of choice and whist.  There was always a cupboard full of games compendiums in the hall and I remember games of snakes and ladders and ludo. She bought me knickerbocker glories in a cafe and refused to condemn my addiction as a teenager to the town’s amusement arcades.

The easy-going Higgins family was a real contrast to my own, fairly strict upbringing.  On holiday in Girvan, even my father seemed to unbend in the bosom of such good-natured bonhomie and my mother drank a lot of tea and laughed a lot.

Every Higgins of my parents’ generation is gone now, and I have lost touch with younger relatives.  There are still a few in Girvan, although the house that was so important to me for many years was pulled down sometime in the 1980s. I’m very glad to be in touch with Joe Higgins from Nottinghamshire, my 2nd cousin, and he’s the one who kindly sent me the photographs in this post.  We keep saying we’re going to meet up someday – in Girvan of course – and I should really do something about making that happen. Looking at the photos (scans of photocopies I’m afraid) I see a strong, broad Irish look.

I don’t know if I’ve caught the spirit of the large cast of individuals that made up the Higgins family but I’ll always be grateful for the wonderful memories they gave me.  If I had a daughter, I would have called her Hannah.

We call them in-laws which is a practical enough legal term but there’s little affection in it.  I mean, how many mother-in-law jokes d’you know?  The French, unusually for such a pragmatic people, call the mother of your partner belle mere – hard to make jokes about her if she’s your ‘lovely mother’.   The term in-law doesn’t even extend that far. Brother, sister, mother, father.  We don’t say grandfather-in-law or niece-in-law.

It’s when we come to aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces,  that things really start to come unstuck. Wife of or husband of – that’s you put in your place. Don’t for a minute think that you’re a real part of my family – oh no – you just happened to marry my aunt/uncle/nephew/niece.  Which is nonsensical, because without outsiders marrying in, there would be no family! Which is why we start off (genealogically speaking) with 2 surnames, then 4, then 8 and so on until we’re all the way back to when Charlemagne’s  mother-in-law  married great-uncle x 15 Elfred.

Why is it that such a flexible and adaptive language as English has a name for cousins who are not directly related to us – 1st (or 2nd) cousin once (or twice) removed – but fails to have names for in-laws? Could it be because in the legal system of our country, relatives by marriage are pretty far down the pecking order?  If you make your will in which you wish an in-law to benefit by your demise, you better make sure you’ve put in a cast iron clause to that effect. Otherwise it’ll all go to blood relatives.

The question of  who exactly is a blood relative is one that will keep the legal profession and philosophers alike busy for many a year to come.  But that’s another subject.

To get back to the subject in hand then, should we be picketing somebody somewhere (the OED springs to mind) about proper terms for in-laws? And does anyone have ideas for what those terms would be? In the interests of research, I googled this very question. I’ll leave you with what I found.

Photo by Rhian vK

Q. Do you call your Aunt’s husband your uncle or just your aunt’s husband? A. I just call him “Mick”

Martha Robertson Higgins (I’m fairly sure she would have been known as Matty, Matt or even Oor Matt) was born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, the middle child of 12 children.  Her father Joseph was an underground fireman down the pit and he and mother Martha both came from Lanarkshire. It’s possible, though, that the Higginses hailed originally from Ireland.

In 1912, she married a coal miner from Hamilton – John Cowan. ¹ There is a photograph of his parents with three of their children and, by process of deduction, I think that the young man in that photo is John. I want it to be him because there’s no other images of him but I can’t be sure.

They set up home in a Fife Coal Board house in Waverley St, Lochore.  A description from 1926 describes the street like this (it’s a fair bet that Martha and John lived in one of the 2 apartment houses):

Built 1909 by Fife Coal Co Ltd. 16 houses of 3 apartments
and 32 houses of 2 apartments with sculleries & WC.

Two months before the events in Sarajevo that would catapult Europe into a World War, their first child was born. She was, as family tradition dictated, named Martha after her maternal grandmother. Tragically, this little girl died of meningitis before her second birthday.  I don’t know why John wasn’t called up to serve, but I think it likely that the government regarded miners as a vital job in time of war.  As WWI dragged on into 1916, Annie (known from the start as Daisy) was born and finally, as the last British Tommies straggled home, Tom (my father) in 1919.

A year later, the coalfields of Fife claimed their first Cowan brother.  Thomas, John’s older brother, was killed in a roof fall. The whole of West Fife was riddled with underground workings and the Coal Board was the major employer in the area.

Martha’s life changed forever on a cold January night in 1925, when my grandfather, working at the coalface in the Aitken pit, was killed by, in the stark words of the official report,  ‘a stone falling on him from the roof’. It seems clear now that he wasn’t wearing a safety hat – but it’s unclear if these were even issued by the company.  The death toll in Fife pits in the 1920s was appalling and safety legislation was slow to be implemented.  John is listed in the Fife Pits & Memorial Book, a wonderful project by Mick Martin (himself an ex-miner) which is described here. The local paper reported John’s death and noted ‘The deceased who was an instrumentalist of marked ability is survived by a widow and two children.’

After John was buried, the battle began for compensation.  Martha was eventually awarded a tiny amount which went almost nowhere to keeping her children in food and clothing. But she was resourceful and practical -  there was little alternative. At first she ‘took in washing’, laundering other people’s clothes.  Then she began to bake, selling plain cakes & scones from home. Eventually, she set up shop in the front room of her tiny house on Waverley Street and the family lived in the back room.  These kind of shops were commonly called Jennie a-things because you could buy anything from a twist of tea to a bar of washing soap. Trays of children’s sweets were kept under the counter – the farthing tray, the ha’penny tray and for the privileged, the penny tray!

A few years ago, I met some very old people who had actually known my grandmother’s shop. They remembered her as friendly and kind.  One story was that she once made toffee apples and gave them away free.  Other people described small items of baked goods appearing from under the counter for hungry – but poor – children. I like these stories for it seems to show someone whose generosity of spirit was undaunted by tragedy and the hardships of poverty.

This photo from around 1939  shows Martha (far right) outside the wee shop on Waverley Street – in a shapeless frock and apparently wearing her slippers for comfort!  To her right is her daughter Daisy, already a striking and stylish young woman.  I don’t know who the couple to their right are, but the girl behind them is Matty Rodger, one of Martha’s nieces.

Two years later, in the middle of another World War, Martha died. She never left Waverley Street. Her will shows that she made extraordinary provision for her children Tom and Daisy – a four figure amount.  A woman who, left widowed while still in her 30s with no means of support, went on for many years to work all the hours a day could hold in order to scrimp and save for the future of her children.

They are:

• the Indian connection
• I was here
• the pound in your sporran
• mors
• smile for the camera
  

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.