Hi Everyone,
First, I must apologise for my tardy reply - a family birthday interrupted my sleuthing!!
Thankyou all very much for your help, I knew that fresh eyes would unearth things I had not thought of myself.
Whiteout - the Fernglen immigration record you found is my man, I have quite a bit on his background and Emily's. He emigrated to New Zealand with Emily and two children shortly after the birth of son James. When I could not find his death on the NZ death index or the burial locator, I contacted the Wanganui council to see whether he had been buried with Emily at Aramaho and not recorded, but they got back to me to say that he was not buried in Wanganui as far as their records showed.
Thankyou Maddy, but the 1913 Australian death is not the James I am looking for. However, not to say he may not have gone to Australia, I just don't know. It does seem a possibility though with the lack of any sign of him in New Zealand death or burial records.
Lucy - you have dug up several things I had not. Firstly, on re-checking the 1905-1906 electoral roll, I can see it is very possible that the James Greenlees recorded at the same address as Emily was her son, not her husband. I had not thought of that, silly me! Son James did not marry till 1906 so quite likely.
I did see the article you mentioned about Emily failing to send children to school regularly, but had been searching PapersPast using the 'exact search' feature and entering Emily's name and had not found her death notice in the 1915 paper (thankyou). I still can't find the Bereavement Thankyou notice of a couple of days later, can you remember what page it was on?
My feeling, based on what I do know of the family, is that it is not too probable that James would have returned to Scotland (one can 'never say never' though) - he would be very unlikely to have had the money to do so, but I think Australia might be an option. I haven't yet obtained any of the marriage printouts for the children but may have to to look for clues. I had been assuming that because Emily listed herself as married in the electoral rolls (I realised by then that she was apart from James) and that her death cert described her as a 'wife', that James had probably died at some point between her death in 1915 and Alexander's death in 1917 in France (as he was recorded as the son of the late James Greenlees). However, it's clear from records available that James was not a good husband or father, so may have been just given as dead by his children once he was out of their lives. In addition, the fact that I had overlooked the fact that the 1905 roll may be referring to James the son, not James the father, means he could have died or emigrated to Australia at any time from about 1903.
The 1903 Australian death is worth investigating further as well Lu, so thankyou for that. From memory, last time I looked at buying an Australian cert, it was very expensive, but I'll have a dig around and see if I can find any further clue to who this might be. By the way, where did you find the info on Alexander's will, another bit I had missed!
Lastly (excuse my marathon message, but want to cover all clues given) - many thanks KiwiHalfPint for the school records. I did not have those, although I knew the children had gone to school in Mosstown, so that is a really good lot of info to add to my growing file.
This has all given me further ideas to follow up on, so sincere thanks for all the time and effort put in by the "sleuthers extraordinaire" of Rootschat. Not much gets past a lot of you, thank goodness.
Kind regards,
Eliza
