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Having made most of the common progress on our family tree, we had a massive roadblock in the form of my maternal grandfather who was generally understood to have been an orphan and boarded out to a highland estate to learn a trade etc.

All we had was a copy of registration of his birth with his birthday, place of birth (22 hope st) and mothers name.

With a common surname (Wilson) and so little to go on, I burned up a lot of credits on scotlandspeople - and some hours in their premises - without making any progress.

Last June I approached the archives at Mitchell Library (from a suggestion here I think but I cannot now find the thread) by email to see if they had any records relating to poor relief etc.

On the downside, it took until last week before they could look at my request, but they always acknowledged my prompts in the interim

On the upside, I received this weekend the most useful package of information from them that has opened doors to a whole area of our family history.

The detail is distressing - a young woman having to find her own way after the death of both parents, falling pregnant and the father disappearing, becoming ill, entering the poorhouse with a young son and dying weeks later.

But the detail in the records allows us to follow lines that were previously closed off, and to add a perspective to our family history that would have been sadly missing otherwise.

Thank you Mitchell Library!

Stewart

Ancestry.com record (testing free trial) for 1881 has 3 generations of my family living in "Pr House" in Portmoak. Schedule 66.

Thanks

I may have been getting my masons and my orange orders mixed up. Pretty sure he was a mason, but I just learned it was a James Wilson who formed the orange order so I need to go and find the photos to be sure there wasn't some reference in his naming! My memory is of him marching to church (of scotland) when visiting us in Langholm.

Yes, I do have the original as well as the later extract. There is info on the original that isn't on the extract - but it's things like mother's name etc that I have included here (above). The original looks to me like it says "Jamie" rather than James, but no other clues (though I note she took a full 2 months to register the birth).

Death cert only reflects what the family knew - and includes (from memory) James and Ian.

Birth cert I have was issued in 1941 but refers to entry no 89 in the 1904 Blythswood register - which is where the illegitimate birth to Helen comes from.

I seems like some of the searches i need to do - by address, by occupation - are going to be expensive in ScotlandsPeople credits, so will need to be done when I next spend a day at the centre there.

But the biggest part of the problem (maybe) is not finding Alexander Wilson and Mary Stewart as a couple within any of the nets I have cast - perhaps I need to cast wider.
 

The birth and marriage certificates came from my grandfathers documents.

He was known throughout his life as Ian but it was also known that his proper name was James - and he named his first son that.

Yes I'm thinking likely scenarios include Alexander Wilson could be a brother or parent of Helen, but it's not obvious what the sequence of events could have been.

In 1911 James/Ian was boarded out in Kinloch Rannoch - an understandable situation with a single parent mother, but not so much if he had been adopted by Alexander and Mary, so assume they are not in the picture then.

Given that he seems to have successfully learned a trade and worked as a joiner - and stayed in Kinloch Rannoch, meeting his wife there - its not clear at what point he would have needed Alexander and Helen to step in and adopt him, especially as it would have presumably had to have happened in a quite small window between 1911 and whenever he became independent.

I can imagine an uncle or grandparent adopting him, but would have thought it more likely to have happened before/instead of being boarded out.

All of which points to Alexander and Mary being fabricated. But it seems a big step to take the name of a made up adopted parent as your middle name - and to pass that name down as a middle name of your daughter (my mother). That makes them seem more likely to be real.