I was rather struck by a sentence in Dominic Sandbrook’s opinion column in BBC History Magazine, v11, n2, Feb 2010, p21. He said that history is nothing more than the sum of countless individual decisions, most of them lost forever. (OK, the reason it rang a chord was because it brought to mind a quote that I had written in my old school notebook to the effect that happiness is made up of a million tiny things that often pass unnoticed).

Delving into my ancestors past, and finding out – often by accident - where they were and what they were doing, how many rooms they lived in and who they married, gives much insight into aspects of their lives (as I have noted before). But questions abound – and many will never be answered I suppose. For instance, how close were families when young children were “servants” in households other than their own? The number of cases where very young children live with their grandparents – and continue to live with them as teenagers, even young adults – is large. And they can’t all be illegitimate. How often did the children get to go back home? In the evenings? At the weekends? Not very often at all? Did the need for supplementary income, ability to feed hungry mouths or whatever outweigh the love for one’s children that they had to be farmed out as servants at an early age? It might be more understandable why a man did not marry – but why were many women still single in their mid-thirties and beyond? Too busy working or looking after parents? Why did some couples not have children at all? Was it by choice? This is history – it is our family history – decisions had to be made and those decisions, perhaps minor, affected what happened next. (And what about the happiness? Did they have happy times? Did they have time to?).

In one of the recent anecdotes I recounted the sad demise of Alexander Croal. I can now add a snippet more to his personal history. I was adding census details for as many members of the (Raitt and related) family as I could. I had Alexander and his wife Susan Raitt down in most of the censuses, but not the 1871 one. Susan had died in February 1871 before the census took place on 1 April, but I found Alexander living at the Old British Hotel, Ladyloan, Arbroath, aged 68, widower, unemployed seaman. Sad really – his wife dies, maybe he can’t pay the rent on the house they lived in, maybe he can’t go and stay with his brother-in-law John Raitt, he has no children to take him in – so he ends up just a month or so after his wife’s death living all alone in a hotel room. He obviously found another job – went back to sea and, as we know, drowned a few years later. This was one individual decision (i.e to return to the sea at over 70) that has not now been lost forever – but in fact it had little  impact on anyone else really.

I can relate another individual decision that has not been lost either and actually transformed a life. A certain Bridget Mottley, flax spinner, in Glamis, Angus had a brief affair and begat a daughter Elizabeth Abbot (her father’s surname). From census details it appears that Bridget was born in Arbroath and after her spell working at Glamis Mill evidently moved back to Arbroath with her daughter where both worked as spinners in one of the flax mills there and lived at 21 Millgate Loan. Nearby lived the Raitt family. Did Elizabeth Abbot and James Dorward Raitt (my great grandfather’s elder brother) meet in a dance hall one night when he was home from the sea on leave? Did she drop her scarf while walking along the shore and he gallantly picked it up?  Was James introduced to the young linen weaver by someone else in the family who worked at the same flax mill? However they met and fell in love (and Elizabeth supplies the answer in her interview in the (Nebraska) North Bend Eagle), James and Elizabeth married in 1968 and set sail for America a couple of years later taking with them Bridget Mottley, her mother.

How different the life must have been in Illinois in the 1870s. For Bridget, especially, the changes must have been almost overwhelming. Imagine the hustle and bustle of cities like New York (where they first arrived in 1871) and Chicago, even in those days, compared to the tiny village of Glamis and the small town of Arbroath (she’d probably never been to Glasgow or Edinburgh). For James a career of farming instead of seafaring. And for all, instead of the endless view of the ocean, the view of never-ending praries. Even if older brother John had gone to the States earlier, also probably following in some earlier relative’s footsteps, it was still an individual decision that James and Elizabeth had to make – and Bridget too since she left her other children and their families back in Scotland - and one that has not been lost or forgotten by their countless offspring in America who are endeavouring to discover their Scottish ancestors’ pasts.

Saturday, 20 February 2010

Previous entry

Next entry