"born Scotland" - advice please

[snowball]

Hi Ruskie,
No, no family members until my Tyneside Liddles marry into the family and join the household in 1861.
Thanks
Rob

[Annette7]

Are you positive her father's occupation is Accountant?   Could it possibly be Annuitant?   An accountant suggests an educated man and seems strange that a daughter would be unable to sign her name.

Annette

[Ruskie]

Hi,
William Cherry's (b Ireland - similar problem) father was called John too - don't know his mother

Not sure if this provides a clue, but William Cherry and Jean McPheal's children in order are, I believe:

James b1840Elizabeth 1842
Joseph 1844
William 1845

Rob

No, you would expect the first son to be John if they followed the Scottish naming pattern ....

[Maggie1895]

Rob, you'd probably done this before but I just tried searching published family trees on An*****y.   Sometimes they can surprise you by having a clue found by somebody else.    Zilch, I'm afraid in both Jean and Jane, plus any spelling variant of Macphail / McPheal / Fs/Phs etc.
Sorry this adds nothing, I'm posting purely to save anyone else having the same bright (?) idea and wasting their time

[snowball]

Thank you for looking, Maggie

Annette - I'm pretty sure it's "accountant". Here's a scan:

[Maggie1895]

I think it looks like Accountant as well.    The single stroke 't' is exactly the same as the 't' in the word 'after'
Which makes it all the more odd, as Annette said, that Jean made her mark rather than signed her name
p.s. oddly enough when I first looked at it I thought the second half of the word was 'land' - perhaps influenced by the word 'Farmer' above.    It was when I opened and blew it up to a larger size I realised the 't's were ts.
I'm showing my ignorance here, but I was quite surprised by the use of the word 'Accountant' at that point - I had imagined that what we think of as an Accountant would have been described differently then