Instant Cousins : archiving my ancestry
- Cheesemongers and Dairies
- House History
- Other Stories
- Reviews, Reports and Research
- Stone, Steam and Dynamite
- The Welsh Connection
- Wheelwrights, Publicans and a Country Lad
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Stevenston, New Street Cemetery
Last week I went on a field trip to Stevenston to search a cemetery in Ayrshire that I guessed might have the graves of some of the Nicol family who grew up and worked in the town for nearly 90 years. Stevenston is a town on the coast of Ayrshire that became associated with the…
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Mapping the Nicol Family
An initial chart of the Nicol family line after Peter and Elizabeth were married The family dynasty that Peter and Elizabeth Nicol created in the 19th Century with children who were directly connected or married into connections with the Dynamite Factory in Ardeer had taken me by surprise when I began to research them. Peter…
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Ramblings….on archives
I am recuperating from a serious cold this week and have not had the mental energy to produce research for my usual blog post this week. That has not stopped me from reading. Two things have come to my attention that made me think much about my family and house research and the accumulation of…
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A Question of Identity
Is it illegal to change your name, without going through the legal route of deed poll ? Not according to the National Archives. As long as a person does not change their name for illegal or fraudulent reasons, it is not illegal to change, for example, a surname. “It is still perfectly legal for anyone…
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The origins of Earlspark Avenue
Last week I offered the legal origins of the house that I live in with descriptions of the Sasine Register entry and the Feu Ledger entry for No 7 Earlspark Avenue. Today I am looking at the early editions of the Ordnance Survey maps to try and establish when Earlspark Avenue was created. Two date-markers…
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The Feu Register
When I started out studying Scottish ancestry and house history, I was introduced to things such as the Sasine Register and Feu Duties. It was where property transfers and ownership were registered and where the registration of Feu Duties were made. It has taken my own research into the history of my house in Earlspark…
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A Police Constable in Yorkshire
I have been researching the McKie family for some time ever since I started family history research about nine years ago. I have gone back three generations to their life in Kirkinner, Wigtownshire (now Dumfries and Galloway). The tragic loss of John McKie at the age of 33 left his wife Agnes caring for six…
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Anniversary Review
It is a year since I created this blog and I thought I would share some thoughts about its progress. Instant Cousins started as a result of my frustrations about how I could write about by research and how to publish it. A couple of years before the Covid lockdown I had attended a brilliant…
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Herbert Wilcox
This is the story of Herbert and his family and my unknowing connection with his grandson. Herbert was the eldest son of my Great Grandfather John Thomas Wilcox, but not the first born. He was born in in 1874 and baptised on December 13th. That was 149 years ago. The Wilcox family were living in…
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BE (Before Earlspark)
Before Earlspark Avenue there was nothing but arable land. It lay at the bottom of the Parish Road from Millbrae to Langside Village, on the south side of the River Cart. The Parish Road is now Millbrae Hill and of course, there is no longer a Langside Village. That is a completely redeveloped (twice) Battlefield…