A new first cousin!

Wow, it’s not every day that your visit to ancestry.com reveals a new first cousin!  

I received a message recently, on ancestry’s message system from someone interested in my grandfather, Robert Hamilton McNee, whom he had discovered was his grandfather.  Now I have always known that my father was an only child, so it came as a bit of a surprise, to say the least, that RHM had additional descendants.  

The message was from James Grant, who had discovered that his late father, James Lennox Grant, had been adopted as a child, a fact shared with him by his mother only after James senior’s death.  She showed him a birth certificate for his father, naming him as James Lennox Hamilton, the son of Hilda Katherine Muirden, housekeeper, and Robert Hamilton, Chartered Accountant, living at 6 Linn Terrace, Cathcart, Scotland.  She also had a letter from the adoptive parents verifying that the certificate was that of their adopted son, now known as James Lennox Grant.  

It took James some research to identify my grandfather (and his) since Robert had – willfully perhaps – omitted his last name.  But he had uncovered several documents showing Robert and Hilda together, and giving Robert’s last name as McNee.  

The information on the birth certificate leapt out at me.  I knew that Hilda Muirden and my grandfather, a chartered accountant, had lived at that address for several years before he died.  I also knew that, while leaving not a penny to my father, he had left his entire estate but for a few small legacies to Miss Hilda Katherine Muirden – for “her care and attention to me in sickness and in health,” a phrase oddly resonant of a marriage vow. So now it appeared, there was indeed more to this relationship.  

It did not dismay me that my grandfather’s last name was not on the certificate.  He had always been, as far as I knew, something of a scoundrel, and somewhat fast and loose with factual details such as his age.  Making it difficult for this child at some future time to track him down seemed to fit the pattern.  So I was not slow to accept that James Grant, born November 1927, was a younger half-brother to my father.  And that the James who had written to me is indeed a cousin.  

What difference would it have made to my father to know that he had a sibling, I wonder.  James was 24 years younger than Douglas, so their childhoods would not have overlapped.  Douglas had graduted from Glasgow University two years before James was born.  But he did spend considerable time over the next few years in Scotland, though he was working in London.  But it is fairly likely that his father made no mention of a sibling. 

Now I have to go and integrate James and his father into the Macnee family tree.  Welcome James, to you and your family.  And thank you for getting in touch.  I look forward to our meeting before too long, and meanwhile am studying photographs for family likeness.  I see several.