Multiple Elizabeths – a story of childhood diseases and death

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Multiples

The IGI records of my great grandmother’s babies were clearly inaccurate, so I did not bother to include several of them in my family tree.  After all, there were multiple birthdates and death dates for a baby Elizabeth.  But they kept showing up, so I finally decided to pursue the detail.  What a sad story I uncovered.  

There were indeed multiple Elizabeths.  The first Elizabeth was the third daughter of my great grandparents Robert MacNie and Elizabeth Hamilton MacNie.  Robert was an umbrella maker – an occupation which made the family easy to identify in the census records – with a shop on High Street, in Falkirk, Scotland.  Their first daughter, Janet, was born in 1852, and the second, Jeannie, in 1853.  The third daughter, named Elizabeth after her mother, was born in January 1855.  Interestingly, I think unusually, and perhaps presciently, Elizabeth’s birth certificate notes that her mother has “Issue: 2 girls alive.”

My great grandfather’s umbrella shop was on this street. The family lived over the shop.

By the time young Elizabeth was approaching her second birthday her mother was pregnant again.  And that is when tragedy struck.  On January 16, 1857, the infant Elizabeth died. 

Death of Elizabeth MacNie, January 16, 1857, 2 years

Exactly one week later Elizabeth, the mother, gave birth to another daughter. What emotions, I wonder, were involved in the decision to name this daughter Elizabeth? 

And how to imagine the sorrow, the pain and distress, when this second Elizabeth died two weeks later of chicken pox.  

Death of Elizabeth MacNie, February 9, 1857, 2 weeks.

Yet soon Elizabeth was pregnant again, for her next child, her first son, was born in January 1858.  A second son, my grandfather Robert, was born in 1859, and then yet another girl, in 1862.  This was the third Elizabeth, who survived and was the mother of the only relative of my father’s we ever met, his cousin Madge.  Later there was one more daughter, Margaret, born in 1865.

As if the loss of two baby girls was not enough, Elizabeth Hamilton MacNie, who died in 1917, outlived not only the two babies, but her oldest daughter Janet, and her firstborn son John as well as her husband Robert. 

From this sad story I try to imagine my great grandmother.  She is a woman I would like to question about how she responded to so much tragedy in her life.  She seems not to have been overwrought by the loss of two children in quick succession, but rather took these losses in stride, continuing on with due diligence to add to her family. 

In later years, when the family lived in Glasgow, I like to envision her as a matriarch with whom several of her children and grandchildren were to live in her terrace house in Dennistoun.  

Roslea Terrace, Denistoun, Glasgow. My grandmother, Elizabeth MacNie, lived at #79 in the 1880s and 1890s.

And above all I like to think of her providing a welcoming home for my father after his parents separated when he was young.