Hi there again
I seem to have got a bit muddled in the fact that I thought Burgess was the name of James wife's family
No.
it is said when we hear or listen to something we tie it in with our present knowledge and the term here is foreign and shows a cultural difference, the same category would be Councillor.
No, a burgess isn't the same as a councillor, but councillors were all elected from among the burgesses - if you weren't a burgess you didn't get a look in.
As we know quite a few people with the surname Burgess this is what I presumed.
The surname is an occupational one, from being a burgess of a town. In Forfar, there were no recorded births at all of anyone surnamed Burgess in Forfar before 1900.
I suppose Guilds are what we call Unions now the representatives here would live in the poorest part of town.
No. Rather the reverse. The guilds were the master tradesmen who were the ruling class in the town - the bosses who employed the apprentices, journeymen and labourers. Trades unions were illegal until the 19th century (one of the few facts that stuck in my mind from history lessons at school!)
Trades people are considered middle class,or even better class and would live in a higher part of town.
Not necessarily. One of the features of the city of Edinburgh is that all classes lived together in tall tenement buildings. Shops and such-like on the ground floor, the gentry and nobility one floor up, then the people got poorer till the very top, where the poorest lived - it being a considerable effort to climb seven or eight or more flights of stairs, the rents were lower the higher up you lived.
the farmers which have always been the background of our country outside the city area, but when they retired at an advanced age they sold their farm or handed it over to a family member, they bought a house in the upper suburbs then did the big OE returning to settle down and then joined some charity organization to have somewhere to go on a regular basis to meet with others from the same field, contribute to society and generally feel good about life after work.
If you owned your land you might retire somewhere else, but land owing was very concentrated in the hands of a tiny proportion of the population. So few people actually owned their farms that that didn't really happen until relatively recently. Farmers who survived long enough to retire usually stayed on, either living in the farm house with the next generation, or occasionally going into a smaller house on the farm. You only need to trace your family in the census through the 19th century to see that.
Charitable work as we know it today was mainly the preserve of the wealthy who had the leisure to indulge in such activity. Most folk had enough to do to look after themselves and their families and didn't have much time for attending meetings outside the home on a regular basis.
However I don't believe that you have to belong to an official religion to be a reasonably good person and help others to the best of your ability.
I agree entirely.
Try to get hold of some background reading, because it helps to understand the very different society and lifestyle of past centuries. Some suggestions:
Parish Life in 18th Century Scotland, Maisy Steven, Watermill Books, 1995
The Social Life of Scotland in the 18th century, Graham Henry Grey, A and C Black, 1901
A History of the Scottish People, T C Smout, Collins, 1972
A Century of the Scottish People, T C Smout, Collins, 1986
and of course the
Statistical Accounts of Scotland, online at
http://stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk/sas/sas.asp?action=public