[BITList] Telegraph article - inbreeding, etc

[Malcolm]

Hugh,

 

As you know Hugh, that my dad was a Scotsman my mum was a Yorkshire girl. My
dad's family came from Montrose. My brother decided to try to find out what
our family tree would be.

 

However he came to a dead end after he had got to my dad's grand father. The
folk who search and look for these things told him that there was no records
before our dad's grand father was born !! apparently in those days only the
wealthy in Scotland could get married. The rest just lived together, so
their children were never registered, they just put their names and birth
dates in the family bible. So he lost in interest in it. I was never
interested.

 

Malcolm.

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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