My Late Wife Ann and Her Burns Connections

[cessna152towser]

Ann's parents both descended from lines of Ayrshire farmers.
I found a census record which showed that one of her ancestors once employed a farm hand by the surname Burns.
Which set me on a course of looking at Robert Burns family tree and ancestry.
In the event I never did find a connection between the farm hand Burns and the bard.
Interestingly though, Burn's Souter Johnny family tree showed a cousin of "Souter" Johnny Davidson by the name of Alexander Davidson, who resided in Lovestone House, Old Dailly around 1800 and who was a miner in Bargany Colliery.
Ann had a great great great grandfather Alexander Davidson who resided in Lovestone House around 1800 who was a carter at Bargany Colliery.
The names for their wives and children did not match so there had to be two Alexander Davidsons living together in the same household.
I visited Lovestone House and ascertained that around 1800 it was the workers' accommodation for Bargany Estate.
That two Alexander Davidons lived and worked together suggests they may have been related but without the ability to trace further back this cannot be proved.
Possibly therefore my late wife had a common ancestor who knew and was related to Souter Johnny but we will never know!

[Father Bill]

It's always fun to discover our connections. Good for you!

[OC Richard]

Very interesting!

My wife has been trying to track down her Knox connection... she has Knox ancestors, miners from the Black Country. According to family legend they were related to John Knox, but who knows?

Census records can reveal things, and give tantalizing hints too. Here what helps is that they were recorded in the order that the census-taker visited the houses. Back in central West Virginia, in deepest darkest Appalachia, everyone lives in "hollers" (narrow steep miniature valleys) so houses are laid out in a single row, along the creek, all the way up the holler. So, the census tells you not only where your ancestor lived, but also who their neighbors were, the entire population of the holler laid out in order.

In looking at a sequence of censuses, I saw that my great-great-grandparents had a daughter, who one year when a teenager disappeared from home, then reappeared the next census. At the same time she returns a baby grandson appears in the home (my grandfather). I assume that this young woman was my grandfather's mother.

But there's more: a couple houses down there was a young man the same age as the young woman, who disappears the same census she does; she reappears the next census but he does not. One can come up with all sorts of romantic and tragic stories that fit the information.