[BITList] Telegraph article - inbreeding, etc

[HUGH]

Mike,

I find Telegraph articles scroll at a snail's pace on my computer, or not at all, but I read a fair bit of the text.

The advice given to incomers to Port Glasgow is, "don't talk about anybody, they're all related".  Which is true to a great extent if we're talking about "related through drink", etc.  My second cousin  David married Mary, the sister of a Johnny, a chap who married Chrissie, the sister of our next door neighbour's mother.  And 30 yards away resides Annie, whose father, Willie, was my uncle Bill's cousin - Bill was my mother's brother-in-law. Annie's partner is my nephew's wife's uncle.  I've changed the names, but the relationships are true, and at the moment I'm investigating whether my wife's friend's husband's family is descended from the same line as my wife a few generations back.

But all is not what it seems. The population of this place was  281 in the 1695 Poll Tax Roll covering the Bay and Neuport. That was  barely 20 years after Glasgow had settled most of the 59 who lived in Neuport, the part built on land they feued  from the landowners to make a downriver port. Before that, the population would have been around 150 in the Bay. In the late 1800s the town had 20,000, not through fast breeding, but as a result of in-migration from, mainly, elsewhere in Scotland and from Ireland. I counted over 200 different places of birth in  a census covering one small area of the town. So we are a mongrel lot.

What should give concern is the chance of half siblings marrying - young Shansiemansie has 4 children to different fathers as far as she can recall, none of whose names appear on the birth certificates. I believe this is an increasing problem.  In my ancestry I can go back for many generations, and  I count only three illegitimate children (to different and unrelated mothers) whose fathers were not recorded.  The births were widely separated, both in distance and in time. Illegitimacy, per se, was never a problem.

Hugh.
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