Dec 2005

A week's free access to the digital archives of The Scotsman in honour of St Andrew's Day allowed me to find heaps of things. One of the more exciting finds for me was finding what happened to two of the children of David SOUTAR and Margaret WIGHT. Check out Walter Wight and his brother Charles William SOUTAR.
One I didn't particularly want to find was that in 1862 the husband and brother-in-law of Jane MIDDLEMAS nee WIGHT were convicted for cruelty to animals a few short weeks after Jane and Thomas married. I don't know which punishment they chose, the fines (plus costs) or the imprisonment, 15s or 10 days for Thomas who owned the horse involved, and 7/6d or 5 days for brother John who was driving.
A 1903 marriage report in The Scotsman did lead me to fill in a few more gaps in the MIDDLEMAS/WIGHT side of the tree as, to my amazement, I found a dtr had ended up in Cheyenne, Laramie Cty, Wyoming. Elizabeth MIDDLEMAS, married Robert B DAVIDSON there. USA census returns, courtesy of ancestry.com, showed them there in 1910 1920 and 1930.

Time to find out what happend to the children of Robert WIGHT and Janet SCOTT now that the 1861 census is available on Scotlands People. Previously I'd not found what happened to wife Janet, supposedly alive when Robert died in 1865. Now I at least know she survived until 1881 when she was staying with son Robert in Wallsend, NBL. The 1861 gave me a birth yr and place for son George, added a son Robert to the tree, and the latter's census data added a niece Ellen WIGHT of Birmingham into the picture. This ultimately led me to yet another son John, a grocer of Edinburgh, then spirit merchan'ts assistant in Birmingham. Looks like the family had a fairly tragic set of deaths within a short time.

Nov 2005

Pat sent me the obit for Sir John Collings SQUIRE (grdson of Elizabeth ROWE, sister to my William who married Honor DAWE), which reminded me that a MORTENs of Denham contact (via Sir Robert TURNBULL's wife Kate) had access to The Times Digial Archive. Wonderful lady Julie, the info she found helped me fill in a lot of the gaps given that the obit merely mentioned 3 sons and a dtr, only naming the one who was a casualty of WWII. Copy of son Raglan SQUIRE's autobiography will hopefully fill in a few more gaps, as will that of George BAKER's "The Way to Wexford", as he turns out to have married the daughter, Julia. My attempts at gaining access to the archive myself have gone unrewarded to date, they didn't answer my request.

Oct 2005

Is the Sarah DAWE who married William KING, parents of the May Adelaide KING who married Walter Wight HENDERSON, any connection to my Devon DAWE families? Jury still out. Trail leads back to her father Richard being a farmer living Drake St, Plymouth when he married Jane BARTLETT in 1863 before emigrating to NZ. Richard is the son of a farmer John, but as yet I don't have any birthplace or accurate dates.

Contacted by Elspeth wanting further details of William HENDERSON, son of Archibald, in Whitehaven, CUL, as she thought he might be the one who married her Marion AITKEN. He was, although having advanced him beyond the 1881 census with this new information, I've lost him again after his wife died in Uddingstone, LKS in 1908.

Tried to sort out exactly what, if any, relationship there was between Rebecca ROWE dtr of James ROWE, and her supposed cousin, husband John Trimble BROOKING. Concluded that the relationship was via the TRIMBLEs, not James' ROWEs (James parents being Edward ROWE and Mary TRIMBLE). WorldConnect db updated.

Sep 2005

Binged on RUNCIMAN updates. Decided to figure out if the Wanton Walls families were related to each other, and to me. Led me on a merry trail covering a lot of territory - even to NZ, which I didn't expect. Sth America, Nth America, Isle of Wight, some even stayed in Scotland! Found a connection to Thomas the Rhymer, via land mentioned in the will of John RUNCIMAN and a reference in Groomes to Patrick MURRAY.

Roger made contact with a previously unknown son, Richard, for Isaac DAWE and Sarah SMITH. Which all checked out.

Confusion reigns. Received a Scottish 1874 dth cert for a Robert SINTON, son to Robert SINTON and Jane PARK. But he married in NZ in 1879. Reviewed data, spoke to relatives, concluded that the informant for the dth, or the registrar, wrote the wrong forename down, should be his brother Peter on the cert.  
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