Author Topic: Did your great great grandfather try to kill mine?  (Read 5223 times)

Offline genjen

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Did your great great grandfather try to kill mine?
« on: Tuesday 01 March 11 20:06 GMT (UK) »
I was going through some old family papers today and found, hidden inside an exercise book, the following clipping from the Nairnshire Telegraph.

The paper is dated November 1961 but the article which interests me is one of those which came in the section devoted to the paper's past. It reads as follows....

90 YEARS AGO - - -

                           ARTILLERY PRACTICE!

It appears that while No 3 Battery of the Nairn Artillery Volunteers was competeing for their Captain's Prize on Saturday, the schooner "Sea Belle of Nairn" was placed in considerable danger from firing. The vessel was bound from Nairn to Invergordon and seems to have got within range of the fire with- ( the next few words obliterated by a fold in the very fragile paper) The weather was dull and foggy at the time. Captain Shaw, master of the "Sea Belle" , in a letter to a Nairn gentleman dated Nov.20, states - " I left the wheel three times and went below and told the men to do the same. The like I never saw done. The balls struck alongside of us and at our stern, the water coming aboard. But if anything had happened to any of my men or the ship it would have been a bad job for Nairn. I had no wind to get out of the way and it would have been terrible to have been shot at my own door - but I expected nothing else"  Nov., 1871


James Shaw was mine.........Now come on...own up. Which of your ancestors was responsible for this? :o :o

Jen
All Census Look Ups Are Crown Copyright from www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

ESS: Howe French Cant Annis Noakes Turner Marshall Makerow Duck Spurden Harmony
SCT: Howe Shaw Raitt Milne Forsyth Birnie Crichton Duncan McBeath Daniel Hay Robertson Jaffrey Smith McDonald Alexander Craighead
NRY: Bushby Smith Bland Iley Cunion Kendrew Thornbury Favell Lonsdale Crossland Rudd Pratt Gibson
WES; Dickenson Jackson Ewbank Waller
STS: White
SRY: Knight
DUR: Smith Littlefair
HAM: Williams Grose Lush Venson