RootsChat.Com

I posted this on The Common Room but it really belongs here. Scotlandspeople have reinstated fuzzy matching as a search option.

Harry

I was told by my grandfather that our Glass ancestors moved from the Highlands to North Northumberland probably late 17/early 18c. Was there some external event around then likely to motivate this move?

There was free movement within Britain and many Scots would have moved down to England to better their job prospects. You mention North Northumberland, and many Scots moved to Newcastle to become "keelmen", sailing the barges that took coal down the Tyne and out to ships which took it further afield -

"There is in Newcastle upon Tyne of keelmen, watermen, and other labourers, above 1800 able men, the most of them being Scottish men and Borderers which came out of the Tynedale and Reddesdale."

Harry

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-64951429

Harry

Or she was descended from one of the many Borders families who moved up to Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Back in the 1980s I corresponded with a retired Northern Ireland civil servant, Dr. John A. Oliver, who had set himself the seemingly impossible task of trying to find out whereabouts in Scotland his Olivers had come from. He did a fair amount of research on the Borders Olivers, and wrote a couple of articles for the Ulster family-history journal FAMILIA. He and I both had an article in the 1988 journal about our respective ancestors. I was luckier than him because my Co. Down Pettigrew ancestors were mentioned in a genealogical manuscript in the Linen Hall library in Belfast, which a researcher (called Pettigrew!) was happy to check for me.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/northern-civil-servant-of-outstanding-ability-john-oliver-1.1012125

Harry