Cousins...who married who?

[Isabel H]

SP index shows the 1893 marriage, and birth Maria Jane Mckenzie in 1872 mmn Tennant. I don't see any similar birth in 1870, so there seems to be just the one Maria/Maria Jane with various spellings.

Do you have the marriage record from SP showing the whole page of the register? Did the bride sign or make her mark? If the latter, maybe someone else gave mistaken information about her parents. 

Or, could she perhaps, like an illiterate woman in my husband's family, have named the people she lived with who were seemingly her guardians, not her parents?  Where was Maria prior to her marriage?

What other names are on the register page? It's a remote possibility, but could a mistake have crept in when the Register was copied to send to Edinburgh? It's easy enough for someone's eye to skip a line when copying.

[scottishlad]

SP index shows the 1893 marriage, and birth Maria Jane Mckenzie in 1872 mmn Tennant. I don't see any similar birth in 1870, so there seems to be just the one Maria/Maria Jane with various spellings.

Do you have the marriage record from SP showing the whole page of the register? Did the bride sign or make her mark? If the latter, maybe someone else gave mistaken information about her parents. 

Or, could she perhaps, like an illiterate woman in my husband's family, have named the people she lived with who were seemingly her guardians, not her parents?  Where was Maria prior to her marriage?

What other names are on the register page? It's a remote possibility, but could a mistake have crept in when the Register was copied to send to Edinburgh? It's easy enough for someone's eye to skip a line when copying.

You know for a second I thought you were on to something because assuming Mariah/Maria Jane are one and the same which I believe they are, her parents were both dead by the time she was 12 (her mother died when she was 6, and her father when she was 12). So I’m not sure who she was living with in the meantime, however upon second look at the marriage certificate both Robert McKenzie and Agnes Townsley are listed as deceased. So there would have been no difference listing her birth parents. I guess they could have both recently died and maybe she felt closer to them living with them for 11ish years with more of a memory. Idk, I was hoping that would be it haha she did make her mark btw, Isaac signed. The only witness name I can make out elsewhere on the document appears to be a brother in law of Isaac’s, Thomas McIntyre who married his sister Agnes.

[scottishlad]

SP index shows the 1893 marriage, and birth Maria Jane Mckenzie in 1872 mmn Tennant. I don't see any similar birth in 1870, so there seems to be just the one Maria/Maria Jane with various spellings.

Do you have the marriage record from SP showing the whole page of the register? Did the bride sign or make her mark? If the latter, maybe someone else gave mistaken information about her parents. 

Or, could she perhaps, like an illiterate woman in my husband's family, have named the people she lived with who were seemingly her guardians, not her parents?  Where was Maria prior to her marriage?

What other names are on the register page? It's a remote possibility, but could a mistake have crept in when the Register was copied to send to Edinburgh? It's easy enough for someone's eye to skip a line when copying.

It must be a guardian thing. I really can’t think of any other possibility that somebody would give two completely wrong names for her parents. These families were very close knit they all would have known everybody. I can’t imagine somebody would have been providing information like that and wouldn’t have actually known. So I believe Robert and Agnes Townsley existed, I just don’t know how they fit in. I can’t find any records on them either. Perhaps that’s who Maria Jane was living with though. That’s the only thing that makes any sense. I’ll have to keep digging. Thank you for your help!

[scottishlad]

Just an update: they are definitely the same people because the son James who acted as informant for the Maria Jane parents Isaac and Harriet Tennant, and the Isaac McKenzie parents James and Rachel Bennet (who married “Mariah” with different parents listed Robert and Agnes Townsley), lived at 604 Gallowgate in Glasgow for both death certificates.

Knowing that Mariah/Maria Jane lost both of her parents by the age of 12, she must have been living with Robert and Agnes Townsley, her guardians for most of her remembered life at that point, and when filling out the marriage certificate she listed them instead.

I still don’t know where Robert and Agnes Townsley fit into my tree, but now I at least have a starting point and names to look for. Thank you everybody for your help!