Amy Johnson Crow of the No Story Too Small genealogy blog suggested a weekly blog theme of ’52 Ancestors’ in her blog post “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.” I decided to take up the challenge of the 52 Ancestors blog theme as a means to prompt me into regularly sharing the stories of my ancestors. So over the course of 2014 I will highlight an ancestor, sharing what I know about the person and perhaps more importantly, what I don’t know.
William Mathieson, my four-time great grandfather, was born according to family sources around 1794 and died in Fyvie, Aberdeen, Scotland on 28 Jun 1839. William was the son of William Mathieson (senior) and Elspet Mackie.
I specifically mention the lack of sources of records for William because the database search engines for the records of Scotlajnd do not sufficiently allow for a detailed enough search to narrow the results down to ‘my’ William Mathieson. There are four William Mathiesons who were born in the 1790’s and who died after civil registration commenced in 1855. The Old Parish Registers that cover the period before civil registration tend to be spotty and a search of those records produces twenty-one William Mathiesons, three of whom died in the county of Aberdeen and none of whom died between 1835 and 1845. Looking at births, there were at least eighteen William Mathiesons born in Scotland between 1790 and 1815, six of whom were born in the county of Aberdeen. It’s a similar problem for the marriage records, both pre and post civil registration. At some point in my journey, I will examine each of these records, in turn, until I hopefully find ‘my’ William but for now, there is nothing promising about these records and the cost of examining each of the records is a factor.
In spite of my dismay at not locating ‘my’ William’s birth and death records, I do know of my connection to William because of the records about his daughter, one of my great grandmothers, Jane, or sometimes Jean, Mathieson. Jane’s death registration from 1887 tells me that she died at the age of 55 as a result of breast cancer and that she was the daughter of William Mathieson, a deceased farmer and his wife, Jane Scott.
Jane Scott’s death registration from 1867 tells me that William had predeceased her and that he was a crofter.
Although there isn’t as much evidence as I would like, and while the search for additional evidence continues, I know that William Mathieson married Jane Scott sometime in the first half of the 19th century. They had a daughter named Jane Mathieson who married Alexander Hadden and then several generations later I appeared. And I hope they know, someone still remembers them.
Mathieson
52 Ancestors: John Hadden (1866-1924)
Amy Johnson Crow of the No Story Too Small genealogy blog suggested a weekly blog theme of ’52 Ancestors’ in her blog post “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.” I decided to take up the challenge of the 52 Ancestors blog theme as a means to prompt me into regularly sharing the stories of my ancestors. So over the course of 2014 I will highlight an ancestor, sharing what I know about the person and perhaps more importantly, what I don’t know.
This week the spotlight is on John Hadden, my 2X great grandfather. He is also the first of three John Hadden’s in my direct Hadden lineage (my grandfather was John Gaull Hadden and my son is John Graham Hadden). The John Hadden who is my 2X great grandfather was also the first significant research ‘brickwall’ obstacle that I had to break through when I began researching my ancestors.
When I began my ancestral hunt just over 30 years ago, I intuitively started by asking my oldest then-living relatives about our family history. I was told that my great grandfather, Alexander Shand Hadden had brought his family, which included my grandfather, to Canada in order to join his mother Helen Shand with her homestead lands in Saskatchewan. Helen, according to the family story, had re-married in Scotland to man named Gammie and together with their sons, they had immigrated to Saskatchewan in 1907 to homestead. Alexander, being older than his half-siblings, had decided to remain in Scotland where he worked as an engineer on a ship in the merchant marine.
I asked about Alexander’s father and Helen’s first husband – what was his name and what happened to him? The answer was that no one seemed to know the answers to these questions although it was speculated that he had died in a quarry accident leaving Helen a widow with a young son.
Some of the answers to my questions came later when the then General Register Office of Scotland (since merged with National Archives of Scotland to form the National Records of Scotland) mailed a copy of Alexander Shand Hadden’s birth registration to me. Alexander’s father was John Hadden, an assistant shopkeeper and general merchant in Bainshole, Insch, Aberdeenshire. Helen Shand, as expected, was listed as the mother. What was not expected was that John Hadden and Helen Shand never did marry.
In his first annual report on births, deaths, and marriages, the Register General for Scotland (report published in Edinburgh in 1861) provided the analysis that, for the year 1855, the first year of civil registration in Scotland, 7.8% of all births in Scotland were “illegitimate.” In the north-east of Scotland, which included Aberdeenshire, the rate was 13%, and in subsequent years the rate was greater still.
All this goes to say that the birth of my great grandfather ‘out-of-wedlock’ in the Aberdeenshire of 1866 was not unusual in any spectacular way. In fact, it is likely that John and Helen did not marry because of their ages at the time of Alexander’s birth. Helen was only 18-years old and John was just 17-years old. Following the traditional Scottish naming pattern, their baby was named after the father’s (that is, John’s) father. Helen kept and raised baby Alexander. John moved on but not necessarily to a free and easy life.
John Hadden was born on 1 Jan 1866, the sixth child of ten known children born to Alexander Bean Hadden and his first wife Jane Mathieson. His father worked primarily on local farms as a labourer and ploughman before finding his calling as a general merchant. Eventually, Alexander would become a Master Grocer and it was into this occupation that he directed his three sons.
The census records for Scotland tell us that by 1891, John Hadden had moved out on his own and was working as a grocer’s assistant in Ayr. In 1895, John married Helen Duff. Helen had been married before and was widowed in 1888 when her husband of only three years, Patrick Keating died of tuberculosis.
At the time of his wedding to Helen, John was living in Glasgow and working as a grocer’s assistant. It is known that Helen had had a son with an unnamed father when she was 19-years old, years before her marriage to Patrick Keating. After Patrick died, Helen returned to her father’s home in Kinfauns, Perthshire where she lived with her father and her then teenage son. I have found no record that suggests that Helen’s son, John Duff ever lived with her and John Hadden.
It doesn’t appear that the marriage was filled with wedded bliss for either Helen or John. Just six years after the wedding, they can be found living about one half mile apart in the town of Perth, Perthshire.
The map, snipped from Google Maps, shows the distance from John Hadden’s residence at Point A to his wife Helen (Duff) Hadden’s residence at Point B in the town of Perth.
John was listed in the 1901 Census of Scotland as a boarder in the Dingwall family household at 7 North William Street whereas Helen was residing again with her father at 17 James Street. While Helen was recorded as being married, John was recorded as being single, something that may be simply explained as an error on the part of the individual who provided the information to the enumerator.
There is no record that I have found indicating that John and Helen ever lived together again. I was unable to find either of them in the 1911 Census of Scotland. John died of pneumonia in Ruchill Hospital in Glasgow on 5 Nov 1924. When he died his occupation was listed as ‘Spirits Salesman.’