Hi Carol,
I cannot help you with the English, as our Horsburgh are from aound cellandyke and Fife in Scotland.
I am still looking for details about James Horsburgh who married Isobel Anderson around early 1800, as i have a James Horsburgh who was their son born in about 1806.
Regards
Peter
Hello Peter. This conversation should really be on the Fife thread. Maybe the moderator will move us?
To find the marriage of James Horsburgh and Isobel Anderson on Scotlandspeople, as ever, you have to get the spellings just right, and in this case it is "Jas. Horsburgh" and "Isabel Anderson". They were married in Crail, Fife, on 17th February 1805. However, you just get those bare facts, no more, from the OPR.
By 1841 James and "Isabella" were living in Cellardyke, aged 58 and 57, and James was a "ship's carpenter". Living with them was their daughter Agnes, a dressmaker.
Later, their son James Horsburgh, a fishcurer employing several men, lived there with his wife Eliza Nicol, daughter of the teacher and land-surveyor James Nicol, a native of Leuchars. I've held in my hand, in the National Archives of Scotland, a beautiful map of the May Island with watercolour illustrations drawn up by James Nicol as part of his testimony to the inquiry into the May Island disaster of 1837, when a pleasure-trip in local fishing boats ended in several women and children being drowned.
James Horsburgh junior observed the local youth playing down the seaside on the Sabbath day from the window of that house and decided to start a Sunday-school for them there. I have plenty of happy memories of that house myself - later numbered and named 17-21 James Street - as it later belonged to my grandparents William Watson and Jessie Horsburgh Cunningham, and I visited the house most days of my early life until the age of 12 when my granny died and it was sold to some distant relatives called Gardner.
Incidentally, don't be misled by the Horsburgh in my granny's name. She was called after a granny from Pittenweem. However, the Pittenweem Horsburghs can be traced back to a Horsburgh who was a shoemaker in Elie, about five miles west of Cellardyke, and those Horsburghs are supposed to have been related to a Horsburgh family of shoemakers in Crail, four miles to the east of Cellardyke!
If you'd like to continue this conversation in private, send me your email address in a private message. I am aware of living descendants of some of these Horsburghs.
Harry D. Watson
(author of "Kilrenny and Cellardyke: 800 Years of History" (John Donald, 1986).