RootsChat.Com

It can be useful to look at the Durham County Council Indexes for marriages as they can confirm a previous marriage and likely maiden name. See link below:

https://gro.durham.gov.uk/Person/1856654/0/4

Thanks for your continued interest, Monica. I think I  probably have all the available records for her. As is often the case it is a question of trying to join up all the dots! Her age is one of the question marks I do have . The family group I have for her in 1841 in Wemyss has her age 6. The story that a lot of the American trees have is that father George ( and wife Catherine ) died of cholera in New Orleans. I do have a shipping record  for the ship Olympus( and an LDS manifest) showing that George and daughter Catherine  travelled to New Orleans in 1851- no sign of mother Catherine but there is a mortcloth record in Wemyss in 1849 for the wife of George Watson which could be her. These shipping records do show young Catherine again as slightly older at 16 years of age. ( The route often taken at that time was to travel by ship to New Orleans, then go up the Mississippi before embarking on the wagon trail over the Plains.). It is actually a very interesting search to do!

Your suggestion re Thomas and George Watson being brothers is a hypothesis that I have long considered but again there are insufficient records to "prove" it! After GR2's suggestion of Cults being Isabella's place of birth I decided to look for kirk session records for that parish to discover that none exist!

William

 Monica, it was actually a connection which for many years I took with a pinch of salt. As I said earlier Isabella's parents are George Watson and Catherine Taylor from her death cert. There are loads of Ancestry trees  generated in America with Catherine marrying James Kippen in Utah in 1858 and which have her parents as George Watson and Catherine Taylor . There are shipping records and wagon train records describing the journey to Utah. My DNA results came back with lots of matches to Catherine Watson / Kippen and while, as with a lot of our research not totally proven, it convinced me that it was worth investigating!

William

Hi Monica

I did wonder if the first letter was a 'c'. The writer does that letter elsewhere on the page like the capital C in stone cutter. There is nothing quite the same as that first letter on the page! ( If the original had not been so poor I would have forked out on the next sheet for greater comparison!).

William

Thank you, Alan. Looks like a very useful resource.

William