Jun 11th, 2009
Can ye direct me tae Willie Law’s tannery?
On Ancestry the other day, I came across a page of Pigot’s Directory 1825-26 for Linlithgow which relates to some of my folk. Apart from name-spotting, it’s a fascinating social document. Linlithgow was a bustling town in the 1820s, although the leather and shoe industry that had brought prosperity to its denizens was well on the decline. The centre of the town was the High Street, off which were Vennels and Wynds. The kirk of St Michael’s, in whose kirkyard many of my ancestors lie, was situated just off High Street and behind it, facing the Loch, was the ancient remains of Linlithgow Palace.
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 (more…)
Apr 14th, 2009
Mors
In my family history research using old church registers, I’ve been coming across some marvellous archaic terms. One is a mortcloth. First large mortcloth, second large mortcloth, first small morcloth, second small mortcloth and even velvit [velvet] mortcloth. The word appears on death records and has a price attached. In my ignorance, I thought it might be the cost of a shroud to bury a person in, but I’m only half right. Googling it, I found this.
A mortcloth (from the Latin word mors, mortis, meaning ‘death’) was a form of pall, i.e. a large cloth (usually black) thrown over a coffin or corpse at a funeral. Mortcloths were kept by kirk (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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