Hello moschops. I'm always delighted to find another Pettigrew relative. I started researching the family way back in the early 1980s, and I published my research in an article which appeared in 1988 in the Ulster genealogy journal FAMILIA. But I've made a few more discoveries since then.
My great-great-grandmother Agnes Pettigrew was the youngest sister of your Archibald Pettigrew in Hawick. Other siblings were Daniel, who settled in Beith, Ayrshire; William and John, who emigrated to the States, possibly to California; Sarah, who married James Richardson and moved to Glasgow, and Jane, married a Blackie or Blaikie and also moved to Glasgow.
Their parents were Archibald Pettigrew, joiner, and Jane Murray, who lived in Belfast. The surname was originally Petticrew with a -c-. After Archibald's death Jane brought the children over to Scotland, and in 1838 she married a Walter Leggat in Dumfries. They then moved to Hawick. By 1861 Jane and Walter were paupers living in the poorhouse in Hawick, where Walter died the following year of typhus. Jane went to live with her daughter Agnes and husband James Stewart - my 2 x great-grandparents - but in 1863 she was admitted to the poorhouse in Jedburgh where she died a few years later. Her death-certificate gives her parents as William Murray, stonemason, and Nancy Howat. For various reasons, I believe they lived in the Ballymacarrett area of Belfast.
Given the fact that Wm. Murray was a stonemason and his son-in-law Archibald Pettigrew was a joiner, I like to think the two men may have played their part in helping to build the Belfast of the early 1800s, its boom period.
I know a bit more about the Pettigrews, thanks to a huge extended family-tree in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast which was compiled in the 1830s by local man Gawin Orr. He traced not only his own direct Orr line but all the other families into which they had married, including our Pettigrews. In the 1960s an American researcher called Ray A. Jones stumbled across this handwritten MS while researching in the Linen Hall Library. The political situation in Northern Ireland was fraught, the "Troubles" were in the offing, and, mindful of the destruction of so many genealogical records in Dublin in the civil war of the 1920s, Jones decided to have the Orr MSS copied and published in book form in case the Linen Hall Library went up in flames. I have a copy of his book.
Briefly, our Archibald Pettigrew who married Jane Murray was the son of Daniel Pettigrew and Sarah Gray of Tullygirvan or -garvan, parish of Comber, Co. Down.
Daniel Pettigrew was the son of Archibald Pettigrew and Isabella Orr of Ballyknockan, parish of Saintfield (neighbouring parish to Comber). These parishes and townlands are just a few miles south of Belfast.
I've made contact over the years with various distant relatives, and am currently in regular touch with a lady in the Co. Down whose husband is a Presbyterian minister, and believe it or not, their manse is only a few hundred yards from the graveyard where some of our mutual Orr ancestors (yours too!) are buried. She once sent me photos of one of their headstones, from the 1600s.
I think that's enough for now!
Harry