Jun 13th, 2009
The wee shop on Waverley Street
I never saw this picture of my dad’s mother, Martha, until about 10 years ago. She died, aged only 54, thirteen years before I was born and I’m glad to say at the time of writing, I’ve outlived her. She and a friend went to have their photograph taken in their best hats and furs in the early years of the 1920s. She wasn’t to know that before long, her world would collapse around her.
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 (more…)
Oct 5th, 2008
The Indian connection
I’ve done a lot of work through the years on my family’s history. Unable to contain myself, I’ve gone spinning off into distant cousins of great-great-grandfathers and the like, fascinated by the spreading web of family. Recently, I’ve begun to look at it again, and to focus on the couple who were my paternal great-grandparents.
He was a coalminer turned soldier, she the daughter of a soldier. The twist is that he served in the British Army in India, where he married her when she was aged only fourteen. And I think that her ancestry wasn’t totally British. Curiously, there appear to be no children from this marriage until five years later. That was very unusual in those days. I wonder if he was posted away from home immediately after the marriage, or there were children, but these died from some tropical disease (cholera was very much a fact of life then).
He was posted back to England and their first child was born on the way in Cape Town. There were to be at least twelve (more…)
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