From the Kirk Session Minutes

One of my favourite sources for researching Scottish family history are the minutes of the Kirk Sessions of the Church of Scotland. Many deal with discipline of the congregation. Although I do not always find what I am looking for I nearly always find something interesting.

My search this week of the minutes of Cambuslang Old Kirk Session were no exception. Although ‘guilt’, i.e. sex outside of marriage, is a staple of the Kirk Session records I think this is the first time I have come across mention of an abortion.

The original record is held by Glasgow City Archives however a digital copy can be viewed at the National Archives of Scotland under reference CH2/415/7:

Page 240

Session House, Parish Church, Cambuslang, 2nd Dec[embe]r 1878.

The Mod[erato]r reported that he had privately dealt with Marg[are]t McLachlan, now Mrs John Cunningham, residing at 80 Crownpoint Road, London Road, Glasgow, as to her alleged guilt, and, as to her having given birth to an illegitimate child. He stated that he had elicited from her a confession of her having been guilty about five years ago, which guilt had terminated in an abortion. She expressed her penitence and a desire to be taken under discipline, but by the Kirk Session of Calton where she now resides. Considering the circumstances of the case, this Kirk Session agree to transfer her to said Kirk Session for discipline, and to enable them to proceed therewith at same time to issue an extract of this minute.

Note: I was unable to find any mention of the case among the minutes of Old Calton, Glasgow Kirk Session and was not able to examine those for New Calton, Glasgow.

A Very Useful Obituary

I was browsing through some family documents on my computer this week when I came across a newspaper clipping and was once again struck by the great amount of information contained in these few paragraphs.

Like most of the newspaper clippings I’ve inherited there is no indication of which paper it came from or the date of publication. However, I suspect it came from the Colne Valley Guardian (a title which went through a number of name changes) and based on other documents I have must have been published on 13th February 1925.

The gentleman concerned, Edmund Wilkinson (1853-1925), was the brother of my great-great-grandfather.

DEATH OF MR. E. WILKINSON.

FORMER MANAGER OF SLAITHWAITE CO-OP.

The death occurred on Monday of Mr. Edmund Wilkinson, at the home of his brother, Mr. David Wilkinson, Hill Crest, Scar Lane, Golcar, at the advanced age of 71 years. He had been suffering from a disease of the heart for a considerable period, and for the last three months had been confined to his bed.

Mr. Wilkinson, who was a bachelor, was very well known in the district, having occupied the position of general manager of the Slaithwaite Equitable Industrial Society for 22 years, and previous to that was 20 years manager at the No. 2 Branch, Bolster Moor, Golcar. He retired from the position in July, 1917. In 1919 Mr. Wilkinson was elected to serve on the County Council, and he represented the Golcar district for three years. The previous member was Mr. William Lockwood.

The deceased gentleman was born at Bank Top, Slaithwaite, and for many years lived at Hill Top. Upon retiring he took up residence at Bethel Villa, Clough, Golcar. In politics he was a Liberal, and was a member of the Slaithwaite Liberal Club. Mr. Wilkinson was a regular attender at Sunny Bank Baptist Chapel as long as his health would permit.

By his oft-expressed wish he was cremated at Manchester on Tuesday, and the funeral took place at Pole Moor Baptist Chapel yesterday. The last rites were performed by the Rev. D. W. Young, pastor at Sunny Bank, and a large number of relatives and friends were present.

Warning: Genealogy may affect your emotional health

This week’s Who Do You Think You Are – the BBC programme in which celebrities trace their family history – was a particularly emotional one. Kim Cattrall set out to discover what had happened to her grandfather who had abandoned his young family some 70 years earlier.

Seeing a celebrity reduced to tears is pretty familiar WDYTYA territory. In fact I’ve long suspected that the amount of emotion to be wrung from a family story is a major factor in deciding which make it to the final series and which are assigned to the cutting room floor.

To the outsider genealogy must seem like a cosy little hobby. The collection of names, dates and dry historic facts may not immediately strike one as something to get the pulse racing and yet the emotional impact of uncovering the past can be very real.

We may not all have a story like Kim’s in our family history but there were certainly elements I could connect to my own family.

I’m someone that believes that you shouldn’t be afraid to ask a question just because you might not like the answer. However, I wonder if before undertaking a journey of ancestral discovery we should all take a moment to consider whether we are prepared not only for what we might find but also for the effect it will have.

So my question this week: Should genealogy carry a health warning?

Do clans have anything to do with researching Scottish genealogy?

A week ago, along with 47,000 others, I attended The Gathering a two-day ‘celebration of the culture and history of Scotland’ and the signature event of Homecoming Scotland 2009, a year-long government initiative aimed at encouraging those with a passion or connection with Scotland to ‘come home’.

As a tourism initiative and a boost to the local economy it appears to have been a success and I have personal evidence of this, as my Scottish-born Mum (now resident in England) was one of those who made a special trip to Scotland to attend. However, those of us who live in Edinburgh, where it seems whatever your surname or however tenuous your connection to Scotland someone will be happy to flog you ‘your tartan’, may have been left wondering what the point of it all was.

Interestingly, The Gathering website acknowledges ‘the near extinction of clan activity’ in Scotland and describes the event as ‘an opportunity to thank the clan associations and Scottish societies from around the world for their role in keeping these traditions alive’, so I guess it’s fair to say this wasn’t really one designed for the locals!

As a genealogist working in Scotland it’s not surprising that I sometimes get asked ‘Which clan do I belong to?’ or ‘What’s my tartan?’. Unfortunately though, these are questions I struggle to answer. I realise that Scotland’s strong cultural identity is one of the reasons why people are so keen to learn about their Scottish ancestors, but the subject of clans seems to have very little to do with the genealogical research I carry out.

However, in honour of The Gathering I thought it was time I looked a bit more deeply into the issue and so today, armed with seven different books on tracing Scottish ancestry, I have sat down to see what I can discover.

The first thing I notice is a certain similarity. Most of the books seem to have a chapter whose title includes the word clan somewhere near the end of the book, but the relevant section is rather short. Some suggest that a book on genealogy is not the place to discuss clans, others give a brief definition but do not indicate how this relates to tracing one’s ancestry as described in the foregoing chapters. Cameron Taylor, ‘consultant to Scotland’s national AncestralScotland initiative’ and author of Rooted in Scotland refers the researcher to the clan search facilities on the website of the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs and on www.ancestralscotland.com (neither of these facilities seemed to be working when I tried today). Alan Stewart in Gathering the Clans (a book with only a brief mention of clans) cites instances of families changing their surname to that of a clan chief whose protection they wanted, whilst Bruce Durie is bold enough to declare that ‘Not every Scotsman has a clan’ as well as giving some reasons why not everyone who had a ‘clan surname’ was related to the clan chief or to each other.

Whilst this has pretty much confirmed what I already knew it hasn’t really given me an answer to the tricky clan question. It seems no one feels they can quite ignore the subject of clans but, in a book on tracing Scottish ancestors at least, they don’t have much to say about it.

So do clans have anything to do with researching Scottish genealogy? Not really but maybe, maybe? At least with the setting up of www.tartanregister.gov.uk I now have somewhere to refer those who ask about finding their tartan!

Sex and the Scottish Ancestor

When I first began researching my Scottish ancestors and discovered that my great-grandfather, Hector McNeil (1886-1954), was born just one month after his parents married I was a bit surprised. Surely a hint of scandal here? Something that got the neighbours gossiping? I mean that just wasn’t the done thing back then, was it?

Further research revealed that not only did Hector follow this particular family tradition, his first child being born six months after he married, but that both Hector’s father and grandfather lived with and had children by women to whom they were not married.

Expanding my research to other family lines I discovered similar stories: a couple who married five months after the birth of their first child; a woman who had two children, probably by the same man, but never married.

Were my ancestors turning out to be the most immoral in Scotland or was there something else going on here? Was it just that my preconceptions were wrong?

As a teenager, I think I had the vague idea that pre-marital sex was ‘invented’ in the 1960s. Even then, as my mum was keen to point out, the ‘sexual revolution’ didn’t affect everyone, with many people continuing to live with their parents until they married and ‘baby’ arriving a respectable one year after the wedding.

Of course as a keen viewer of costume dramas I did know about illegitimacy. Some innocent young girl taken advantage of, usually by an employer, is thrown out and disowned by her family when her pregnancy is discovered. She usually comes to a sticky end and should the child survive the ‘shame’ of illegitimacy follows him or her throughout life.

No doubt such situations did happen, but in my family the majority of illegitimate children appear to have been born to parents in long-term relationships.

As I’ve researched more and more families I’ve discovered that mine are hardly unique. There do appear to have been some regional differences though and, as these particular ancestors of mine were all involved in coalmining, I suspected that sex before (or outside) marriage was particularly common in Scotland’s mining communities.

However, this week I’ve been researching two families from the north of Scotland, one from a fishing community, the other from an area that was largely agricultural, and I’ve been finding much the same thing.

This has got me thinking about the issue again. Firstly, was the apparently high rate of pre-marital sex in Scotland (or ante-nuptial fornication as it is often described in Kirk Session records) related to the law that legitimised children upon the subsequent marriage of their parents? (This applied only when both parents were free to marry, i.e. not married to someone else, at the time of the child’s birth.)

It is difficult to know how aware people were of this law but it may explain why some parents were content to wait until after the arrival of their child to get married, rather than rush to tie the knot before the birth. Legitimacy was generally only important with regards to inheritance and as most working-class Scots had little to pass on to their children the legal situation was perhaps of less importance than the attitudes of their neighbours.

The law doesn’t always seem to have been universally applied either, as I found recently. I came across a child who was born to parents who married a few days later but waited until after their marriage before registering the birth. The registrar, however, considered the birth to be illegitimate (the word is included on the birth record) although the date and place of the parents’ marriage was recorded, as is usual on Scottish birth certificates.

It has been suggested that pre-marital pregnancy was seen as an insurance against infertility, particularly in agricultural communities where a farm worker was expected to provide family labour. Personally though, I think the most convincing argument is simply that in some communities sex was an accepted part of the courtship process, just as it is for many people today.

But what I’ve really been thinking about is why all this pre-marital sex should come as such a surprise to me. Why did I think that the youth of great-granny’s day were so very different from my own generation? Was there a particular time when what was once common behaviour began to be seen as something to be ashamed of and to be hidden from later generations? Has there be a deliberate attempt to rewrite history?

If so, I’m sure our ancestors weren’t expecting all us genealogists to come snooping around uncovering their secrets!

Marriage With Deceased Wife's Sister

In England & Wales a widowed man was prohibited from marrying the sister of his deceased wife until 1907. It’s a subject that gets mentioned in the columns of family history magazines from time to time and, despite the law, there’s plenty of evidence that such marriages did happen. There usually seems to have been some secrecy involved, the couple married where they were not known, and it was not difficult to escape detection.

I’ve an example of a man who married two sisters in my own family tree. However in this case there seems to have been little effort made to disguise the fact and I’ve often wondered how the couple got away with such blatant law breaking.

In 1882 my great-great-grandfather Albert Barker married Ellen Culpan. Ellen died in 1892, leaving Albert with three young children to bring up alone, and in 1894 he married her older sister, Jane Culpan.

I have copies of both marriage certificates and they are remarkably similar documents, right down to the fact that both brides gave the same address. Both weddings took place at King Cross Wesleyan Chapel in the District of Halifax, Yorkshire. The marriages were not performed by the same minister but both certificates include the name of Walter Common, Registrar.

At this date when a marriage took place in a nonconformist place of worship, a civil Marriage Registrar had to be present when the couple exchanged their vows. My interpretation would be that Walter Common not only registered both marriages but also actually attended them.

Witnesses to the first marriage were John Barker (most likely Albert’s older brother) and Jane Culpan (who would become Albert’s second wife). John Barker was also a witness at the second wedding but obviously Jane could not be a witness at her own marriage and so another sister, Hannah Culpan, performed the role.

Nearly twelve years had elapsed between the two marriages during which time Walter Common must have attended hundreds of weddings so we can perhaps understand why he was apparently unaware that the law was being flouted in front of his very eyes. I can’t help wondering though if he didn’t experience a certain feeling of déjà vu, seeing so many of the same people assembled at the same place. I have identified Walter, recorded as a Building Society Secretary & Registrar of Marriages, in both the 1881 and 1891 Censuses and so I am sure it was the same person. In 1891 he was aged 73 so well into his 70s by the time of the second marriage.

The second marriage appears to have taken place with the support of both the Barker and Culpan families. Although I do not know that Albert Barker regularly attended the King Cross Wesleyan Chapel, the fact that both marriages took place there suggests a fairly long association and makes me wonder if fellow members of the congregation, even maybe the minister himself, knew Albert’s wives were sisters. Did everyone simply turn a blind eye?

There was certainly support for the idea of allowing widowers to marry their deceased wives’ sisters. In fact the issue was raised so often in parliament that in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Iolanthe the Queen of the Fairies sings, “He shall prick that annual blister, Marriage with deceased wife’s sister”. The 1907 Marriage Act removed wife’s sister from the list of prohibited marriages but, confusingly, it was not until 1921 that a man could marry his deceased brother’s widow.

The fact that Ellen and Jane were sisters was passed down through the family but it was fascinating to see the marriage certificates and to discover more of the details. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has a similar story in their own family and to learn of the circumstances surrounding the marriages.

Who's that Girl?

When my maternal grandmother’s house was cleared after she died this photograph was found among her papers. There are no names, date or other details recorded on it, not even the name of the photographer. My mum could not remember having seen the photo before but thought that the baby bore some resemblance to my aunt at a similar age and was probably my grandmother.

Due to family circumstances my grandmother, ‘Nannie’ to me and my sister, had few possessions dating from her childhood or even from the early years of her own children, but somehow this photograph had survived the ups and downs of her eighty-two years.

When I began researching her family, building on records collected by my mum some years earlier, one of the tasks I set myself was to identify the people in this photo and the approximate date it was taken.

Having traced records of my great-grandparents and their family I now believe this photograph was taken before Nannie was born and is of her parents Hector McNeil (1886-1954) and Agnes Gray McNeil née Frickleton (1892-1923) with their three oldest surviving children: Andrew Frickleton McNeil born 1911, James ‘Jimmy’ McNeil born 1913 and Agnes Gray Frickleton McNeil born 1915.

I suspect the photograph may date from the family’s move from the mining village of Standburn near Falkirk in Stirlingshire, where these children were born, to the City of Glasgow where their next child, Hector, was born in 1917, and so was probably taken about 1916.

What I don’t know is the identity of the girl standing at the back of the photo. She was obviously considered important enough to be included in a family portrait but somehow she seems a little apart from the rest of the group, not quite one of the family. Although the photo is a little unclear it appears that Hector has his arm slightly in front of her, rather than around her protectively as with his son.

It’s rather difficult to judge how old she might be, but certainly quite a few years older than the other children and, I think, probably too old to be Agnes’ daughter.

Agnes was the eldest of ten children, eight of whom were girls, and so my guess is that this girl is one of Agnes’ little sisters. Agnes might have been glad to have an extra pair of hands to help take care of her growing family and the girls’ parents might well have been grateful to have one less mouth to feed.

I’ve been lucky enough to find out quite a lot about the Frickleton sisters. Firstly through the detailed information on various Freckleton/Frackleton/Frickleton families at www.geocities.com/pookyface that alerted me to the fact that Agnes was the only one of the sisters to remain in Scotland, the rest (and one brother) all emigrated. Then through records of their emigration and later lives available online at www.findmypast.com and www.ancestry.com. And finally through the great kindness of a former client who asked ‘if there’s ever anything I can look up for you in Canada’ (probably not imagining that there was!) and found me several newspaper notices and an extract from a book relating to the two sisters who emigrated to Canada and their families.

I realise I will probably never know for certain who the girl in this photograph is, and, that as far as researching my family history goes, this isn’t one of the greatest unanswered questions. But for some reason I’d really like to put a name to this face, so if anyone out there thinks she looks familiar I would love to hear from you!