May 26th, 2009

Newspaper clipping

By way of being an update to the story of the Robert Bensons, I received today a copy of the microfilmed record from the Hamilton Advertiser.  Even though I have a good copy of the photo already, there’s something exciting about seeing it in situ.  Those Bensons got a good chunk of the page, by the looks of it.

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?

May 25th, 2009

Linlithgow burgesses

In 1840, two unlikely branches of my family met. The Bensons from Midlothian were powdermakers, miners and labourers. This group of families lived for many years in and around Glencorse. The local cemetery is stuffed with their remains, if you’ll pardon the expression. It’s easy to go sideways in the family (Robert, whose brother was Francis and who had young Francis and so on and so on) but not as simple to go backwards. The earliest person I have is the wife, Isabella, of a Benson who would have been born around 1770.

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 (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…)

May 19th, 2009

4 generations with 1 name

This photograph (professionally taken) is in the back garden of Retta Cottage at 2 Edward Street, Hamiton. Note the props: a rug has been flung over the fence to make a backdrop and there are potted aspidistras either side of the men. I think it was taken in or around 1933.  The photo’s purpose was to show four generations of a family all named Robert Benson. I’m currently researching where and when this picture appeared and if a story was written to accompany it.

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 (more…)

May 17th, 2009

Wartime weddings

It was 1942, bang in the middle of World War II. Two Cowan family weddings were planned – one for March and the other for June.  The first was the wedding of Daisy Cowan, my Dad’s only surviving sister.

Her name wasn’t really Daisy – it was Anne Brown Cowan (on her marriage certificate, she’s known as Annie).  The name’s important – she was named directly for her paternal grandmother Anne, who was born in India and married a Scottish solider. Family legend says that Daisy came about because somebody gazing into her pram, cooed ‘awww she looks like a wee daisy’.  It’s a nice story but of course it isn’t true – I’ve found a reference to the original Annie Brown being called Daisy.  For all I know, there are more – enough for a daisy chain perhaps?

At the age of 25, she was marrying Ian MacEwan, also 25 – whose real name was John. This happens a lot in Scottish families – Ian is an equivalent of John.  And then there’s Johns who become (more…)

May 16th, 2009

Everyone’s Favourite Fish – the Red Herring

The Red Herring is a common fish scooped up  in the nets of genealogists worldwide by the thousand.  It’s almost as common in the Mare Genealogica as familia fabula (the family myth).  Being red, it stands out on a page of closely packed type with the scintillating header of COR-CRO: 15 of 385 pages. Being friendly (and equipped with special fins) it catches your eye, waves at you as you try to place (or even plaice, but no we musn’t resort to childish silliness here, we’re a serious blog you know) where you know it from…

It’s a familiar face, it’s got your grandmother’s nose and it says it was born only 10 miles from the birthplace you have on your record – can it be – yes it must be – it’s that long-lost relative you thought you’d never find. Hallelujah.

But beware – red herrings are the cuckoos of the seas.  Hidden behind that cuddly exterior is a whole shoal of bogus relations who will, before you realise what’s happening, devour your entire family tree.

How can you spot one of these interlopers? Here’s an example – if Auntie Mabel’s husband Fred appears to have been born before his youngest child, maybe he’s not the Fred you thought he was, the one so beloved by the family who could pull rabbits (more…)

May 16th, 2009

Thomas Cowan & half a life of soldiering

I’m poring over Thomas Cowan’s four-page service record that arrived a couple of days ago.

He joined up in 1860 to take the Queen’s shilling for 12 years – although what he actually got was “Two pounds and a free kit“. He was a 23 year old coal miner at the time – all six of the Cowan boys were down the pits, a brutal and badly-paid occupation.  I imagine the recruiting sergeants coming to the pit heads looking for likely recruits who’d swell the ranks of the lately depleted Army in India were met with open arms. Peter Bailey of Fibis tells me that

After the Indian Mutiny of  1857-1858/9, the European soldiers of the East India Company’s arnies were offered a choice to leave, with a bounty, or transfer to the British Army. About half transferred – but this left the remaining regiments a bit short of soldiers. Accordingly, fresh recruits were needed.

The second page is the meat of the record and would have accompanied Thomas throughout (more…)

May 15th, 2009

Have your ID ready, please

Identity is something we’re quite preoccupied with these days.  Identity theft and the issue of identity cards for the general population. And of course the ‘who do you think you are?’ generation.

For two of my ancestors, ID cards were a fact of life. Both carried them during periods when Britain was at war with Germany.  First, my father, Tom.

Tom, a policeman, had what was called a reserved occupation in World War II.   A Schedule of Reserved Occupations was drawn up in 1938 and included farmers and railwaymen as well as policemen. These jobs were regarded as vital to the country at home.  Nonetheless, Tom went to the recruiting offices of every armed service and tried to enlist.  He was turned down – because a stray cricket ball had punctured his eardrum (more…)

May 15th, 2009

Is it worth it?

Yesterday, I signed up for my 14-day free trial of Ancestry. This would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that for years I’ve baulked at joining it.

At first, in total ignorance, I thought it was simply a fancier side to the Mormon archives in Utah – what I now know to call IGI.  Jargon really is invidious, isn’t it? Try as you might, on whatever topic, you can’t avoid it forever.  And genealogy is no different. Best to go with the flow then – saddle up my BMDs and go on over to the IGI for a long cool drink of OPRs…

Then I thought it was only for those in the US – the British records seemed woefully under-represented.  And as I, at least as far as I know, have zero connections over the pond, there seemed no point to looking at American records. You’ll notice a certain British insularity creeping in here, leading to a blind eye being turned to the fact that ahem Ancestry also holds (more…)