Migrants, internal and external
Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Free
I took this week’s prompt as an opportunity to do some freewheeling research on Scottish History. I completed T.M. Devine’s Scotland's Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600-1815 which offers a cool and unemotional look at the social and economic forces driving migration within and out of Scotland over two centuries, and provides good background detail to the lives of my Scottish ancestors.
Over four generations, from about 1750 to 1850 my grandfathers moved from the southern edge of the Highlands – Port of Menteith - first to the Stirling area (Cambusbarron, Denny and Falkirk), then to Glasgow, then to the Americas (Argentina and the USA) and back to great Britain. But the broad strokes of the economy still don’t explain the individual decisions – why this brother left, but not that one; why this destination not another. So much of the family story remains shrouded, but the pattern of movement is indisputable. .
My 3G great grandfather, Duncan (1761-1830), was a blacksmith in Port of Menteith, one of the professions or trades that had some degree of standing in Highland society. His second son, Alexander, and at least one of Alexander’s sons, followed in their father’s footsteps. But Duncan’s firstborn son, John, worked for the the Graham family, first in Port of Monteith and later on their Gartur estate in Cambusbarron, near Stirling.
Darn sure that’s (not) Duncan.
While in Cambusbarron John, my 2G grandfather (1791-1867), helped supervise the draining of the Carse of Stirling, a major project in the modernization of Scotland in this period, under the direction of Sir William Murray Esq. of Touchadam and Polmaise. But John suffered from the very agricultural developments which he was part of promoting, as the increasing concentration of wealth by the landed classes saw them expel many of their agricultural workers while turning their farms into homes of landed gentry. In 1837 John left Gartur for Denny.
Robert (1819-1899), my great grandfather, was John’s fourth son. He too did not follow his father’s employment. On the contrary Robert was an umbrella-maker, with an establishment on High Street, in Falkirk, from 1841 (or earlier) till about 1875, when he moved to Dennistoun, a suburb of Glasgow.
Robert’s eldest son, my grandfather Robert Jr. (1859-1940), was to leave Scotland for many years, one of those who helped spread the Empire to far distant lands. He left Glasgow in the 1990s for Argentina, then Mexico and eventually settled in New York, where he had an accounting business in Manhattan. But like many more emigrants than we often realize, he left the USA and returned to Great Britain in 1918.
As for my father Douglas (1903-1967), his travels began early. Born in the USA he crossed the Atlantic several times with his parents before his mother chose to remain permanently in England. As an engineer, however, he worked in the Indian subcontinent for two years, and in Australia for two years. For the rest of his life, however, he remained happily in Great Britain.
Thus my family, clearly, fit the pattern described by Devine of migrations, both internal and external.
Going further back into the history I have been trying to establish the connection between my family and the clan of which they are supposedly a “sept” so I took a closer look by reading Highland Society and Economy c1500-c1750 by Ian D. Whyte. I had read elsewhere that the concept of the “sept” may be somewhat mythical, but Whyte indicates that basically they were branches of a larger family, but that allegiances were made and broken for a myriad reasons, not all of them having to do with bloodlines. He locates the Port of Menteith as sitting astride the Highland line, and I suspect that the family may have begun its migration south a generation or two earlier than the mid-eighteenth century. More research ahead.
The photos are from “Old Photographs Of Blacksmiths In Scotland” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooy4ee9wfFU