Sepia Saturday 134 – want to share my pram?

The inspiration for today’s Sepia Saturday post comes from a photo of a lady in traditional costume posing with a baby in a vintage pram.

Here’s me in my “now vintage” pram – cool wheels in March 1965.  This is one of my favourite photos of my Mum

This pram is probably responsible for my interest in sports cars.  Note the piece of string hanging over the edge.  Teddy was tied to it for easy retrieval when I launched him over the side.  My pram even had a fancy canopy to keep the sun off – back in the days when you could wheel your baby outdoors and leave it.

Inevitably, you sometimes have to share your wheels -

but I seem quite happy sharing the pram with my little brother.  Here we are again looking a bit bigger, with our granddad, Douglas, and Teddy.  I still have Teddy although he is now a bit bald, cross-eyed and mis-shapen

Now, burn some rubber and go and see what everyone else has been inspired to write.

Jo

Sepia Saturday 133 – baby elephants?

Today’s inspiration for Sepia Saturday is a photo of a baby elephant at Taronga Zoo, Sydney, taken by Sam Hood (1872-1953) and comes from The State Library of New South Wales via flickr. It was taken about 1930.

For some strange reason, Great Granny’s album has, once again, come up with a rather obscure but appropriate image.  Meet Dougal and the baby elephant in St Edmund in August 1928 -

I haven’t a clue who Dougal is.  I gave my family tree a good shake, but no Dougals fell out.  Just a few nuts.

Perhaps someone on Tinterwebs will find him and let me know

I suspect that this Nellyphant was a working Nellyphant, rather than an “exhibit”.  I’ve never been a fan of zoos and, as a child, I would cry when I saw the polar bears or the tigers cooped up at Edinburgh Zoo.   I’m really soft when it comes to animals (Lassie/Flipper/Black Beauty/Skippy – NOOOO!) and cried when I saw the amazing Lippizaner horses ”dancing” to classical music.  A few years ago a friend persuaded me to go to see a dolphin show while on holiday in Tenerife.  I should have known I would snivel my way through it.

Check out the other elephant-inspired posts at Sepia Saturday

Happy weekend!

Jo

A carte de visite from Harry and Minnie Murray – Sepia Saturday 132

Inspired by a lovely blog that I follow, Forgotten Old Photos, I did something I haven’t done before.  The lady who writes the blog buys up old photos and posts them in the hope that they might be reunited with descendants some day.  There are helpful folk who do some research if the photos have names on the back, and there is a general “PARTY!” feel when a photo is reunited with its family.

I rummaged around on Ebay and found a cute Carte de Visite.  The seller was in the US (I’m in Scotland) but the CDV luckily had names penned on the front so I snapped it up.  Meet little Harry and Minnie Murray who had their photo taken by Patersons of Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow.  I wondered if I could find some relatives for these two.

Harry & Minnie Murray

I was so excited when it arrived!  Harry and Minnie were very likely born in the Glasgow area, and although I research the Scottish records on a daily basis, I knew I would have trouble finding them in the Census Returns – there was no date given on the photo, which meant I couldn’t estimate their years of birth and would have to trawl through Census documents hoping to find a Harry Murray who happened to have a sister (assuming she was his sister) called Minnie.  Harry can be short for “Henry” and Minnie can be short for all sorts (my great granny was a Minnie – short for Andrewina, strangely enough).  Oh dear.

I guessed that Minnie looks about 7 and Harry looks about 4, but I’m not good at guessing ages.  Most of the time I can’t even remember my own age.  Please chip in with your guesses at their ages!

I Googled for Paterson’s Photographic Co and discovered that they operated from Sauchiehall Street between 1882 and 1897.  The style of the card and the printing of the company name suggest a time period of the late 1880′s to early 1890′s.

I also sent a copy of the photo to Forgotten Old Photos, asking for advice about dating the photo from the clothing and she kindly responded “First of all the card stock..light pink..I assume it is the same color on the back.  Pastel colors like pink were used after 1880. The card has rounded corners so that dates it sometime after 1870.  Button trims and the high neck and tight sleeves on the girls clothing look like the 1880′s to me.  That little boy is really cute in his trimmed suit.  Childrens clothing is much harder to date..because they handed it down.” 

Although all my Scottish research is carried out using the original records which are held nearby in Edinburgh, as it was Saturday, and raining (excuse for not cutting the grass – YAY!) I logged on to my Ancestry.com account to see what I could find out about the two little ones.  Ancestry doesn’t have access to Scottish records, apart from transcribed Census returns so I tend not to use the site much, except for passenger lists and non-Scottish Census data.  Well, what an eye-opener (if the shaky leaves were telling the truth, but I’m still not totally convinced ) but I think I found them in the 1881 Census.  They were the 8th and 9th surviving children of Archibald Murray and Marion McColl and were living at 438 Crown Street, Glasgow.   Minnie was aged 6 (“Marion” on the Census,  born c 1875) and Harry was aged 3, which fits with the dates of the photography business, and would date this photo around 1882.  That makes this card about 130 years old – I wish I had family photos (even one!) that old.  By the time of the 1891 Census, the family had moved to 285 Crown Street.

Look at Minnie’s FOUR strings of beads, and the embroidered detail on Harry’s jacket.  Considering that Archie had 9 kids by then, he was doing well – or perhaps Harry’s suit and Minnie’s beads were borrowed from the neighbours, which was accepted practice when a family had saved enough for a studio photo.

From Ancestry, it seems that Harry and Minnie probably had an older sister, Maggie May.  Yes, we know a song about her, thank you, Rod  Maggie married George Noble and emigrated from Scotland in 1906, landing up in Winnipeg and later moving to LA, where she died.  I wish I had asked the Ebay seller (Robert at hc-quality) where he had acquired the card from.  I guess we will never know for sure if the carte de visite was a treasured memento of her kid sister and brother that Maggie May took with her when she left Scotland.

As a follow up to this post, I will use the Scottish birth, marriage and death records to see if I come to a different conclusion rather than relying on census data, Ancestry member family trees and passenger lists, which can easily lead you to barking up the wrong tree

Jo

Head over to Sepia Saturday and see what other interesting old photos are being discussed with this week…

Sepia Saturday 130 – daft women and their cats :-)

Thanks to Little Nell for babysitting us Sepia Saturday-ers while Alan loafs about drinking delicious beers on holiday with the GLW.  I’m sure Nell will do a marvellous job in his absence.

This week’s post is allied to Alan’s black and white photo of the legs of an embracing couple, with a (probably ginger ) cat stepping between them.

Anyone who even knows me vaguely will have realised that I am Cat Woman.  Not the glam one from the film, the bonkers old one with all the polythene bags who befriends stray kittens and wants to bring every unwanted cat in Europe home and look after it.  Yes, just like Brigitte Bardot, but with less tan  As a child, living on a farm, we had our fair share of abandoned animals, but one cat made it his mission to become part of our family.  By the time I was 18 months old and toddling, I was feeding this cat, and after our old collie died, he appeared near the house.  Needless to say, he wheedled his way in, slept in front of the fire and lived to a ripe old age.  We never named him, as we always thought he would disappear one day, just as he had appeared, but he was still around for my 18th birthday.

Subsequent cat boarders were mainly of the “my landlord doesn’t allow pets, can you take him for a while?” type and it was a long time before I had a cat to call My Very Own.  I rescued Brian from a friend’s flat where the flatmates were being less than kind.  I didn’t like to leave him Home Alone so I used to stuff him down the front of my jacket and travel around Edinburgh with a large kitten buttoned into my top.  It was probably the highlight of my life, from the point of view of male attention  I went to the ABC Cinema in Lothian Road in Edinburgh one night to see a double bill of “Life of Brian” and “Blazing Saddles”, and the kitty came with us.  He slept throughout the whole thing and was thus named Brian.  He had the run of several student pubs in Edinburgh and, even as a sizeable cat, still liked to travel in my jacket.  I remember being in a fish and chip shop in Fountainbridge one night when a man came in with a very agitated greyhound.  While I was waiting on my chips, the dog kept whining and trying to sniff at me, and the owner kept telling him to shut up.  One of them knew I had a large cat secreted about my person – a large cat who was also getting a wee bit annoyed.  I suppose  my scars don’t show much now, after all this time.

Fast forward to the year 2000 and I managed to find a litter of kittens and bagged two – the most inquisitive one, and the cutest one out of the litter.  The most inquisitive one went the way of all curious cats, and after he was 18 months old I never saw him again.  The cutest one, Bumble, is currently kipping on the bed  Thankfully.  Here he is

When my partner, Adrian, and I got together, he was very blase about Bumble, and I was used to Bumble sleeping on the bed with me.  Where he BELONGED.  After a few grumbles from Adrian and nights where he shut the cat out of the bedroom (and the cat ripped chunks out of the carpet) Adrian finally accepted that he could either sleep in the cat basket in the hall on his own, or join me and Bumble in the bed.  It has been a happy tale ever since

Jo

Sepia Saturday 126

Alan and Kat have provided the inspiration this week by posting a group photo of a wedding on the Sepia Saturday blog, so I had a rummage in my archives and came up with another photo of Granny from Great Granny’s Album.

This one is particularly poignant as it shows Granny (on the right, being more sensible than usual) and her younger sister, Chrissie, (on the left) in their roles as bridesmaids to their older sister, Margaret.  Margaret married George Thom in Perth on 26 October 1935.  Granny would have been 26 and Chrissie would have been 22.  They both look a lot younger than that to me.  There has always been a striking resemblance between Granny and Auntie Chrissie  - they both had the same eyes, cheekbones and red hair, but seeing this photo is quite a revelation.  Back then it seems, Granny and Auntie Margaret had almost identical facial features – their eyebrows and smiles are  very similar in the photo.  We called Chrissie and Margaret “Auntie” because they were Dad’s aunties, but they were actually our Great Aunties.

Granny died when I was only 3, but I can remember visiting her a few times, and I remember Auntie Chrissie and Auntie Margaret well.  Auntie Chrissie never married, and was a sociable lady who attended the usual family functions with gusto until she was quite elderly.  She was also a great letter-writer and kept in touch with many members of the family via the Royal Mail.  Auntie Margaret was a typical Perthshire farmer’s wife and lived in a cold stone farmhouse which we visited a few times a year on the way to see other Perthshire farming relatives – usually Dad’s cousins.  One year, on the way to the annual raspberry-picking fest (eat your own weight in raspberries, which we did),  I was invited to stay overnight at Auntie Margaret’s house while the rest of my family went off to the final destination.  I’m guessing that I was about 5 or 6, and it seemed like a great idea at the time (they had a PIANO and a DOG – items which were on my Wish List) so it was agreed that I would stay the night with them.  When it came to bedtime, despite the hot water bottle, I was inconsolable – I bawled my eyes out for my Mum and Dad, and must have been a real pain in the butt to my hosts.  The dog tried to bite me every time I went into the kitchen, so I hung around in a corridor by the back door until Mum and Dad came to get me.  I never got to play the piano, either.  At that stage, I hadn’t had any lessons, but I wanted to tinker with it – I thought it couldn’t be that difficult.  I found out otherwise a few years later

RMS Titanic: and the young Scottish violinist played on…

As you will no doubt know, it’s the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on Sunday 15th April.  1514 people lost their lives and 710 were rescued.  I was appalled to read that the lifeboats could only have taken a third of the ship’s passenger and crew capacity of 3547 people.   The law at the time stated that the number of lifeboats required should be calculated on the gross register tonnage of a ship, not her passenger capacity, which beggars belief.

I was particularly interested in the story of the 21 year old Scottish violinist, John “Jock” Law Hume, who bravely played on with his orchestra as the ship sank, and I decided to see what I could find out about him.  The orchestra were hired by C W and F N Black, a firm in Liverpool who provided musicians to the steamer companies.  The musicians were paid £6 10s a month plus a 10s monthly uniform allowance.

John Hume (first on the left) on Carmania - last photo taken of him, by kind permission of Yvonne Hume

John was born on 9 August 1890 at 5 Nith Place, Dumfries.  His birth certificate notes his father as Andrew Hume, musician, and his mother as Grace Hume, maiden surname Law.  It also notes that John’s parents were married in July 1887 in Glasgow.  Andrew registered his son’s birth in Dumfries on 22 August 1890.

Andrew is listed in various Census returns as a musician, music teacher and violin maker.

During further research I discovered that John was engaged to Mary Catherine Costin, a glove factory worker, before he left on his final voyage.

John’s body was recovered by the Cable Ship, the Mackay Bennett, and along with many of the others who lost their lives, he was buried at Fairview Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia on 8 May 1912.  Yvonne Hume, John’s great niece told me that he was buried, unidentified, and given the grave number 193.  It was on 16th July that John’s body was identified from photographs sent to ‘White Star’ by Yvonne’s great grandfather Andrew, his name was then added to the grave.  This was the one and only reason that John’s body was not brought back to Scotland.

Six months after the sinking, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Johnann Hume Costin, on 18 October 1912 in Dumfries.  Being a single parent with no means of support, she applied to the Titanic Relief Fund for financial assistance, but was told that she had to first prove that John was Johnann’s father.   She managed to provide evidence which satisfied the board and was issued with £67 and a small weekly allowance.  I wonder if John ever knew that Mary was expecting his child.

Andrew must have been suffering greatly, having lost his wife, Grace, in 1906, then  John’s untimely tragic death, after which he received this staggering note from John’s employers on 30 April 1912:

“Dear Sir:
We shall be obliged if you will remit us the sum of 5s. 4d., which is owing to us as per enclosed statement. We shall also be obliged if you will settle the enclosed uniform account.
Yours faithfully,
C.W. & F.N. Black”

Needless to say he declined to pay, and astonishingly, it also appears that John’s wages were docked as he did not complete the journey.  How mind-numbingly insensitive to a grieving family.

Andrew moved from Scotland to England in 1915 and set up a violin shop and workshop in London, where he died in 1934.

While researching for this post, I made contact with Yvonne Hume, who is John’s great niece.  She has carried out extensive research on John, both here in Scotland and in Nova Scotia, and has written a book “R M S Titanic The First Violin” about John and his family.    Yvonne kindly provided the photograph of John and his fellow band members aboard “The Carmania” – the last picture taken of him.

National Records of Scotland are holding an exhibition showing documents relating to some of the Scots who lost their lives, including John.  The free display runs from 16 April to late May in the Dome at New Register House in Edinburgh.

I found some interesting facts about the Titanic, such as they needed 75,000lbs of fresh meat and 40,000 eggs on their provision list.  You can find a lot of information at Encylopedia Titanica, including stories of the passengers and crew.

Jo

PS:  I haven’t seen the film – after I found out that they had taken “artistic licence” and shown William Murdoch having committed suicide, which he didn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it.  It then became a work of fiction, as far as I was concerned.

Sepia Saturday – Library

The inspiration for this week’s Sepia Saturday post is “Library”.  I’m not a big borrower of books for casual reading,  but I AM a huge fan of reference libraries – the ones where you can go and look up all sorts of weird and wonderful facts.  I know, it all sounds horribly dull, but really it isn’t.  Honestly

Near to where I live, we have lots of exciting places to look up interesting stuff, the Loanhead Archives Centre is a mine of information on Midlothian ancestors, although housed in a rather uninspiring 1960′s building and now bursting to overflowing.

East Lothian Archives Centre moved at the end of March to a fabulous new building in Haddington, the John Gray Centre – very “old building meets steel and glass” and bears absolutely no comparison the their previous billet.  It was requiring modernisation and updating, shall we say  Now they are state of the art!

There is also the rather posh National Library of Scotland, which has an amazing amount of original manuscripts and obscure records…

My most-used “library” is a series of rather ordinary book cases containing very valuable, and often one-off unpublished books relating to Scottish genealogy.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of the book cases because they are so ordinary that it never occurred to me to take one, however they are housed in the Dundas Search Room of New Register House in Edinburgh.  When you visit Register House, you are led through a series of search rooms, where members of the public can research their family histories and professional Scottish genealogists work.  The first room that you come to is known as the “Adam Room” on account of the fabulous Adam design.

I asked permission to lie on the newly-laid plush carpet and take a photo with my phone (and it was laughingly granted) so I did.  If you don’t ask, you don’t get, as my Granny used to say.  Yes, they all laughed at me

You can read more about the historical Adam Dome if you wish, but I warn you, if you are ever in Edinburgh and fancy tracing your family history, the ceiling will be a major distraction.  Here are a few more photos I took on my phone (the poor quality is due to me holding a cup of coffee and a slice of cake as well as the phone) during the launch of the 1911 Census – the reception was held in the Adam Dome and the staff dressed up in period costume.  Not in the least bit stuffy!

Sheila – our Blue Lady – check out all the Registers in the bookshelves, they go around the entire circular room.

Linda, Blair and Susan all out of uniform and togged up in period gear

And finally, the statue of King George III set in an alcove, which creeps me out because if you are the last to leave and the emergency lighting is on (or it is winter and there is a full moon coming through the dome) he glows in the dark.  He was found during renovations in a rather sorry state, blackened and covered in a green lichen growth.  He was sculpted in alabaster by the niece of the first Registrar General for Scotland and first placed in position in 1791.

I always say goodnight to him to keep on his good side.  Check out other Saturday Sepians’ interpretations of “Library”, and come and join in if you feel inspired, there is a new theme every week, and your photos don’t have to be sepia.

Jo

PS:  For a Scottish Library blog with a HUGE sense of humour, check out Orkney Library and Archives Blog.  I defy you not to subscribe – so funny!