William Forsyth and Marion Grant of Edinburgh

[MonicaL]

Hi Malcolm

A great (free too!) place to search for BMD indexes is here www.freebmd.org.uk

I am not familiar with these indexes and when things were introduced but searching now, none of the entries for the page this Margaret Grant's death is recorded on seem to include an age at death.

Monica 

Added: Re maps, this is a great site to have a look at www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_MAPS/0_maps_thumbnails.htm

[Malcolm33]

  Thanks Monica.    Yes, must agree FreeBMD is a great site and I have found so  much there.   FreeREG is great too (http://www.freereg.org.uk/cgi/Search.pl) but like FreeCEN there is so much missing and not transcribed yet.    Beauty of FreeCEN (http://www.freecen.org.uk/cgi/search.pl) is that it shows everyone in the household and then you have the option to look at the next or previous household.

   Years ago when working for Hemisphere Travel in Melbourne (now defunct) we had a BMD UK Service, and this was in great demand, so we had to have researchers in London and Edinburgh.  I could tell a thousand stories about what came out in some searches.    However, there was always a good number of tough one's where an entry just couldn't be found.   Certificates were needed not only by other travel agents arranging travel documents, but for people who needed to prove who they were.    One lady got quite upset when I suggested we could search the previous year for her own birth - she had lost all of her documents in one of our big bushfire outbreaks.    We didn't charge a cent extra for any search since it didn't cost us either - in London our owner's sister went to Alexandra House twice a week and she only wanted a small fee for each certificate, not the search.    However her time was limited then as she was still working and used to do the search in her lunch hour.    So Tom or myself would make a trip home at least once a year and then spend hours tackling the hard ongoing cases.     The lady aforementioned had been born a year earlier so that was found quite quickly.
      One very elderly lady who came into our office needed her birth certificate for her pension.  She like many others had come to Australia when only an infant and for some it was a shock to find out that they weren't Australian.   When asked for her birthdate, she stood back, thought for a moment or two and then said, 'Well I feel about 70".
      One very hard case was for a woman in her late thirties.    We tried everything including other years.   It was a bit desperate as she had booked to go overseas and time was getting short.  Then one day we received an interstate call from her mother who calmly told us that she had her daughter's certificate and she would get the passport for her and make up some excuse.   On no account were we to let the daughter know that she had been adopted.
      Another case put us in touch with Gene Pitney, but that is another long story for another time.

      You won't find my first marriage in FreeBMD, yet it is recorded in UK registers - I once looked it up in London and found it.   You just have to know which register to look at.    They keep separate books for consular marriages and ships at sea.

[MonicaL]

  I cannot begin to think of doing what you describe without the lovely online resources we have today. How lucky are we that so much available online (free or paid for). You paint such a picture of those times and what being in the travel industry was about! I did two months of that as a summer student job in London....finished me off 

Monica

[Malcolm33]

I cannot begin to think of doing what you describe without the lovely online resources we have today. How lucky are we that so much available online (free or paid for). You paint such a picture of those times and what being in the travel industry was about! I did two months of that as a summer student job in London....finished me off 

Monica

      Being a travel agent in the 1950's/1960's was a whole different ball game.   Cook's in London put us through months of training in a classroom on their 6th floor at Berkeley Street.    It was like being back at school, similar desks, blackboard etc and even a head master.   The British course lasted 5 weeks as did the Overseas Course, and Continental was 8 weeks - full time.   Then you had about two or three years doing all the donkey work behind the scenes.
      Today someone wants to fly from London to say Tunis and it is all done in moments on a computer, hotels everything.
      Then it would mean-
      Rail tickets London-Dover, Seat Reservations (Smoking/Non smoking, window corner or corridor seats, facing or back to engine).    Meal tickets for afternoon tea in Pullman car.
      Shipping ticket Dover-Calais, cabin requested occasionally, meal vouchers.
      Rail Ticket Calais-Paris Gare du Nord - this involved checking the type of train, Express, Rapide or other.  Seat reservations
      Blue Meal Tickets for Dinner Calais Paris.
      Cross Paris tickets Gare du Nord to Gare du Lyons or perhaps Austerlitz
      Rail Ticket Paris-Marseilles.    Couchettes or Sleeper reservation.
      Blue Meal Tickets for Supper and Breakfast.
      Uniformed Man at Marseilles to assist in transfer to Hotel.
      Hotel booking Marseilles - usually reserved by Cable and Wireless - telephone at short notice
      Uniformed Man following morning to assist transfer to Port
      Shipping Ticket Marseilles to North Africa - cabin reservation.

   Then you had to get them home again.   We had to issue all rail tickets and for this one had to know ticketing points all over Europe, i.e. border points as different fares required for each country.  Also had to know the German Kursbuch inside out and the thousands of different North American Railroad companies.

     That is only the tip of the iceberg.   Knowledge of each country was essential and you never knew what to expect.     First thing I was given to work out when assisting a booking clerk was to work out the timetables from London to Oulu in the top of Finland.      I was on call once a fortnight at home for the Daily Express who required a 24 hour service.  Got home one night and had to get a reporter quickly to Tezpur on the Indian-Tibet border ....  we would get news long before it appeared in the press.
     Was on the phone for 5 hours one evening trying to cover all possibilities that Burgess and MacLean might make leaving Russia.

     All changed today.   Travel Agents are now only retail shops booking from brochures.
   

[MonicaL]

Wow 

[Malcolm33]

 Something new has just come up.    Allan has found that William Grant Forsyth and Elizabeth Borkowski had another son named Albert William Forsyth b. 1891 and Allan has found his Army record for his service during WW1.    This not only gives addresses for his father and mother, but also a W Grant of 43 Brown Street, Ponsonby, Auckland which would have been about May 1915.

This may explain what John Grant Forsyth was doing in Auckland in 1886 away from his family in Christchurch.

  Therefore it would be likely that the Forsyth Brothers travelled to New Zealand with their mother's Grant family.    I shall now try and identify this W Grant and see if we can establish how they got to Aoteoroa.    Any assistance would be very welcome.

[Malcolm33]

    In the last few days with kind help from 'Middlesbrough' we have established that Marion Grant was the grand-daughter of William Aitken and Jean Harvey and that Marion's mother was Margaret Aitken born 1811 who married John Grant.
    Margaret Grant/Aitken's death certificate names her parents as William Aitken and Jean Harvey.
    See http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=232868.0
    This earlier topic also lists Isobella Duncan Aitken as well as Margaret, and we can see from other My Heritage and Rootsweb listings that Isobella came to Australia on the Herald in 1844.    Her descendants now live in Queensland.
     Judging by an 1851 census which shows a William Aitken and Jane living in Edinburgh, it would seem that Jean or Jane was only 15 years when she married William at Coldstream (birthplace in 1851 census given as Gordon, Berwickshire which is close to Coldstream.)
     The search for Margaret Aitken's father, known to be William from her marriage proclamation, was complicated by the age she gave in each census that put her birth year around 1812/1813 although we now know it was in 1811.

[MonicaL]

Hi Malcolm 

Great to hear of your continued progress.....!

Monica

[Malcolm33]

Thanks Monica.    Solve one lot and up pops another - this time with my gt.grandfather James Draffan and his mysterious unknown marriages.
Cheers Malcolm