RootsChat.Com

As a footnote to this, I was inspired to look at the image of the register for St George Colegate, Norwich, which records the baptism of William Darby in February 1795.  He became the first black circus proprietor in England under the name Pablo Fanque, and thus got a name-check in Sergeant Pepper.

Neither his birth nor his parents' marriage in 1789 mentions skin colour.  William/Pablo became famous in his time, but there will be many other examples where the "default assumption" can be misleading.

I'm with Voltaire on this (no doubt he's really pleased about that) - "To the living we owe respect: to the dead we owe only truth."

My ancestors seem to have been either pillars of virtue or good at covering up, which is rather boring, but my wife is convinced I relish the teenage pregnancies, toyboys, suicide and syphilis in her family in Victorian times.  She's right.

On the other hand my ancestors can be traced in several lines back to Norwich at least as far as Elizabeth I.  That is about halfway back to the affair of St William of Norwich, when the good citizens kicked off the rumours which developed into the Blood Libel.  Chances are reasonable that I've got that in the tree somewhere.

Another, rough, quote: Felipe Armanez-Ernesto said something like "the only reasonable response for anyone to the history of their country, whatever the country, is shame"

My house was built in 1933 as part of a small private delevopment with a number of small crescents.  The numbering was continuous around the estate and our house was on the spur from the main road.  After 1945 (and a little rearrangement by the Luftwaffe) my road became prt on a new ring-road.  The crescents were given individual names but the numbering stayed unchanged.

The result is that the numbers on "my" road now jump 76 places from the house next to mine, across the entrance to the crescents.  Before the satnav era I got used to running out to flag down delivery vans and on one memorable occasion an ambulance (kidney stone, mine, 2am)

To go back to the original question, the lists are incomplete.  I have just found a definite gap in the incoming lists. 

The Laurentian arrived in Glasgow from New York on 2 Nov 1903 and there appear to be 5 pages listing the passengers.  In fact only the first page is for the Laurentian; the remaining 4 pages (with different handwriting) appear to be for the arrivals on the Columbia, which left New York on the 14th.  Among the passengers on this part of the record are a couple who didn't get married (in Pennsylvania) until the 12th, 10 days after the Laurentian reached Scotland.

Being of a Scrooge-like disposition, I have waited for the window of opportunity provided by free access to the New York passenger lists before checking some notes I made years ago.  I thought I might have misread the images - turns out I hadn't.
My wife's G-G-uncle William D Hunter emigrated to the US from Scotland in 1884, though he never took US nationality.  He returned at regular intervals to visit his relatives (though not as often as his sister, who crossed the pond more than 60 times between 1888 and 1946)
In 1907 he landed in New York and the passenger list records his height as 5ft 7in and his eyes as brown.  When he returned again in 1920 from Glasgow, he was 5ft 11 with blue eyes.
There's no doubt he's the same person: the final twist is that if they officials had checked his eyes more carefully the second time they might have noticed the total number had been reduced by 50 percent - he'd lost one in a train crash.
I may have to give up on family history - I'm having to take so many pinches of salt with the available "facts" that my blood pressure won't stand much more.