In a previous post I described how John McKie died tragically in 1879.
When John McKie died he had been a Master Stonemason. Indeed he had been described as a Contractor in some of his children’s’ marriage certificates. The wages of a Stonemason during this part of the Victorian era would have been in the region of seven shillings per week. John would possibly have been earning a little more than this if he was employing anybody. He didn’t own property and rented a house in Braehead, a hamlet adjacent to Kirkinner. This village lies at the top of the Horn of Whithorn, close to the Bay of Whithorn. It is not far from Newton Stewart but its nearest market town was Wigton. Braehead was a working hamlet with a sawmill, corn mill and a smithy. It is an extension of Kirkinner and its name derives from the fact that it sits at the top of a brae that was a useful landscape when the railways arrived.
John died in December 1879. Six weeks later, after approaching the Kirkinner Parochial Board, his widow, Agnes was now in receipt of aliment (maintenance) under the Poor Law of 1845.
Trying to understand all of this involved a hunch and a journey to Edinburgh.
John left Agnes to bring up six children, all school or pre-school aged. The youngest, Robert, had never met his father. The 1881 Census describes Agnes as a Dressmaker. I cannot imagine that she was working for someone and I therefore presumed that she was working from home. Her income was unlikely to match her late husband’s wages. She must have gone to the parish for assistance. But, how to find out ? My online searches did not throw anything up. Going to source was the only way. I knew that my own city, Glasgow, keeps the Poor Law records at the Mitchell Library. However, those of Wigtonshire are kept at National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. I believe that they are one of three registration districts in Scotland whose Poor Law records are kept there.
I booked a place for my visit and was given good help to find the record I needed. I had to apply for a Reader’s Card and arrived for my search not knowing what I would discover. I was shown to a table and advised what I could do and not. With all archive searches and recordings in an Archive, only pencils can be used for note taking. I did not need to wear gloves on this occasion and I was given permission to take photographs. After a short wait a porter arrived with a parcel wrapped in stiff brown paper tied up with legal red tape. I undid the tape and inside I discovered a soft bound register of the 19th Century Foolscap Folio paper size. The title on the front said: The General Register of Poor Belonging to the Parish of Kirkinner.
There was no index and I gently turned each page to see if I could find any mention of Agnes McKie. The shock of discovering her was compounded with the title of the entry Number 160. It stated that the claimant was ‘Widow John McKie’. Agnes was never mentioned by name in the Register.
From February 1880 Agnes was in receipt of aliment until she was struck off the register in 1891. She was initially in receipt of seven shillings per week. At the time of John’s death he was earning at least this amount of money. That was the average income for a Stonemason but in other family records he was described as a Contractor which implied that he was earning more than this. The Poor Law maintenance was never designed to do anything other than to relieve destitution, and only for the needy. Assessment was designed to keep the poor in the same condition that they found themselves in before their application, if not worse off.
Two months after losing her husband and with no income at all to keep her family of six, Agnes has turned to the Parish for help.
Normally people receiving poor relief were unable to support themselves, either through age or incapacity. They included orphans, the sick or disabled and the insane. The ‘sturdy beggar’ or the able-bodied poor, were not generally entitled to support and were indeed legislated against, although in practice many did receive some degree of assistance.(NRS)
Clearly Agnes was not able to support herself or her family and here she is in the Register described as ‘Partially Disabled’ due to the size of her family. The money she received came from the Parish. The Church would have been collecting money through a number of means but in particular the local wealthy landowners and they would have made grand gestures with their funding. This was not without comment. The Revd James Reid wrote in his Statistical Accounts of Scotland, Kirkinner, (1838), fifty years before Agnes made her application for maintenance from the parish, that the willingness of the ‘heritors’, landowning benefactors who contributed up to £50 a year at that time, to continue their generosity did not discourage the poor from making applications. Clearly he equated the amount of money collected by the Parish for the relief of the poor with the number of applications made to the fund. The 19th Century was a morally work oriented society when it came to helping the poor.
Initially Agnes received seven shillings per week to feed herself and her six children. As each child grew and left school, this weekly maintenance was reduced accordingly. Agnes then supplemented her income with Dressmaking as a cottage industry. The register shows how the maintenance level was reduced until 1891 when the family was struck off the Register.
I shall describe what happened to Agnes and her six children in future posts. Agnes never remarried and she moved to live with her sister in Wigton, eventually living with her daughter Louisa in Irvine, Ayrshire where she died in 1928 aged seventy seven.
One of her children, possibly Louisa in Irvine, had this stone erected in the Kirkinner Parish Churchyard. The family were truly grateful members of their parish and through her decade of struggle bringing up her family of six, Agnes and her children made important contributions to their community and helped to create a dynasty that I reap the benefits from with my own family. John and Agnes were my wife’s Great Grandparents.
