A number of things have happened since writing about Peter Nicol and his arrival in Ayrshire.
I realised how little my research was on Peter and his family and started exploring in more detail. As a result I have been discovering a number of events and facts that make his life and times a really interesting story.
By exploring the Census returns for Scotland I have now been able to complete his family line. He and his wife had a total of eight children and my Wife’s Grandfather, Andrew, was the youngest. The relevance of this is that I have lived with my wife believing that she and her sister were the only two remaining members of the McKie family line to our knowledge. However, if there were eight Nicol children in Peter’s family, there is likely to be many cousins and second cousins living in the West coast of Scotland that the two sisters have never known about.
So, it was with pleasant surprise that I discovered a member of the Nicol family, not of Peter’s line, but his Sister’s, who is currently living in Australia. This came about when I was trying to find any records relating to Peter Nicol’s eldest child, James. It was becoming very challenging to find anything other than a couple of Census returns when James was a child. I use a number of search engines to find the records and stories of my ancestry. Two are subscription services and the other is pay per view. Ancestry.com is probably the best known and is very powerful in the way that it throws up ‘hints’ connected to other peoples searches and trees. Equally powerful, for different reasons, is Find My Past which has the current rights to the 1921 Census returns. This was an interesting ploy by the National Archives not to allow Ancestry the monopoly of all the Census records. It also meant that family history researchers have had to take out two subscriptions to find all the information they need. The third site that I use is Scotlands People. This only charges you for the record that you wish to see. It is not expensive, you pay £10 for 40 credits and a page will cost about 6 credits to view. For me it costs a lot less than the other two subscriptions but it doesn’t have the same search engine power as the others that can link a researcher to other people and their finds.
Scotland’s People was not being very helpful with my finds for James Nicol and when I tried the other two sites, I discovered somebody who had his death certificate attached to their tree and I could not find it myself at all. This was on Ancestry which allows messaging on the site between subscribers. A short request for more information and an offer to share my research led to a very positive contact from someone who is a Nicol descendant on Peter Nicol’s side, his sister.
This is an exciting event because somebody, living in Australia will now be able to offer me a lot of detail and hints for further research that I could not find from Glasgow because there is no one in my Wife’s family who is still alive to help with this.
With information from James Nicol’s death certificate I was able to begin to put a lot of information together to understand the connection of the Nicol family with the industrial history of Ayrshire from the 1870’s to the 1960’s. I knew that Peter had arrived in Ayrshire from Aberdeenshire in the 1870’s and after working as a miner for a short time he then joined the enormous workforce of the Nobel Dynamite Factory that was quickly being developed in Ardeer, between Stevenston and Irvine. His eldest son, James, I discovered, was a Merchant Seaman. I know this through searching not for James abut his wife Helen Leckie Marr. Finding her name on his death certificate helped to identify Helen on the Census return. I couldn’t find James because he was at sea. Helen was at home and she had a son, Henry who was born in 1900.
Henry, Peter Nicol’s Grandson, I knew a little of because he was the family member who was present at his Father’s death in 1934 in a Glasgow hospital. It was Henry’s Census return from 1921 that gives a researcher many stories to relate.
The 1921 Census return for Henry Nicol and his wife Margaret (1921,Nicol, Crown Copyright,National Records of Scotland)
Henry was living at Number 145 Quay Street in Saltcoats. As described, the street ran from the town centre to the harbour pier. At the age of 21 Henry was married to Margaret, daughter of Mary Taylor Murray. Margaret was 20 years old. Taylor was highly likely to be Mary’s paternal name which was the normal practice for both men and women in Scotland, to carry their family name as a middle name. Henry and Margaret were living with her Mother, who was a Widow, and her two brothers who were aged 23 and 24.
Saltcoats, Ayrshire, in 1911 showing location of Quay Street. Ardrossan is just to the west of South Bay. (Ordnance Survey Ayrshire Sheet XVI.NW & SW with permission from National Library of Scotland).
Saltcoats is just over a mile from Ardrossan which in 1921 was a very busy shipbuilding port and centre of railway activity. It provided an enormous amount of employment for both these industries. It would have been an easy walk from Saltcoats to work in Ardrossan for the men and women who worked there. Also, Saltcoats was not far from Stevenston and the Ardeer Peninsula, the location of Nobel’s Dynamite Factory. It was the perfect location for working in these three industries, shipbuilding, trains and dynamite.
Henry was described as a Rivetter at the Ardrossan Ship Yard Company Ltd. He would have undertaken his apprenticeship heating up the rivets on a brazier before he tossed them to catcher above him who passed it with tongs to the Rivetter who would hammer it into place. By 1921 Henry might have been using a pneumatic riveting gun but it was still heavy and very loud manual work. Rivetters were often paid by the number of rivets they hammered in each hour.
Henry may well have met his wife via her brother who also worked at the same shipyard as a Red Leader. Red Leading was the process of painting the completed metal panels of a ship with red lead. This was a dual dangerous manual task. Firstly because of the constant contact with the toxic lead content of the paint and second because of the heights that they worked to paint the outside of the ship to prevent corrosion.
There is an excellent piece of research written by Catriona Levy and the Ardrossan Local History Workshop in 1983 that gives a long, worker centred, study of the Ardrossan shipyard from its early 19th Century beginnings until its demise in 1983.
Looking at the Census return for Henry, it is interesting to see the occupations of others in Quay Street. Several were employd bt he Ardrossan Dry Dock Company as well as the Ardrossan Ship Yard Campany Ltd. Not surprisingly, Messrs. Nobel Dynamite Factory also has a presence.
This post is the result of a contact that I made with another Ancestry researcher in Australia and the discovery of one Grandson of Peter Nicol. His dynasty will keep me busy for months to come.