Happy New Year Everyone. Welcome to the Times' 10th anniversary edition. You heard right: It really was 10 years ago that the very first edition of this monologue landed in your mailbox. Those years have shown us quite a few things about our Coubrough ancestors and their cousins--not the least of which was that they had cousins! So, c'mon in, and pour yourself a nice cup of tea. We'll toast our toes by the fire while I spin you a tale of a hunt, and how the world began.

When we began our search, we knew practically nothing of the family before Grandpa Matt & Grandma Liz, and precious little about them. We believed we were probably the only ones in the world, and certainly the only ones in Canada--that Grampa Matt & Grandma Liz were the ancestors of all Canadian Coubroughs. Not only did we not guess at the hundreds of us there really are, all over the world, we didn't even know there were so many other branches in Canada. Far from the truth today, our "uniqueness" was likely born a myth--possibly not true even at its first appearance. It must be said, though, that it was only very recently that we found Jim and Annie Coubrough were not the first of the name to come here, and Grampa Matt was not the first Coubrough born in what is now Canada. In fairness to the original myth-makers, however, I must also say that they are unlikely to have known the Malcolm & Catherine Coubrough who were in Niagara, Ontario, at about the same time as Jim and Annie were married in Halifax. And it seems hardly more likely that they would have known of David & Mary (Mckay Smith) Coubrough's 1912 arrival in Montreal. David's father was Jim's first cousin ⁽¹⁾, but David was 25 years younger and Jim had been in Canada for at least five years before David was born. Jim's parents had both died years before ⁽²⁾, and news from home may have been rather sparse. And we don't know why Jim never went home when he got out of the army. He had a wife, a son, and possibly a daughter, by then, so maybe he just couldn't afford the trip. Or he just wanted a better life, or he was not on good terms with his family, or ....the list goes on.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions: enough to keep us looking for a while yet, and many whose answers we may never find. When, for example, did Jim & Annie actually arrive in Nova Scotia, and why Jim was in the army, instead of in the Crum's calico factory, like most everyone else in his family? We think Annie's family came to Canada because their home island of North Uist ⁽³⁾ was cleared, but when, exactly, did they get to Cape Breton? They were in Upper Canada (Ontario) by the summer of 1853, but how long were they in Cape Breton, and why did they move to Canada West? Jim & Annie probably moved to Ontario because her family was here, but did they move because he was out of the army, or did he get out to move? He was a guard (under-keeper) at North West Arm penitentiary, in Halifax (1856-7), so he was likely out for a year or so before they moved Ontario, in late fall 1857 or early spring 1858 ⁽⁴⁾. By why wait? Were they reluctant to move, or were they just trying to save up enough money to get there? Annie's brother Coll bought their land, and held the mortgage on it, so we can suspect that Jim & Annie weren't overly wealthy.

And when Jim left the army, why didn't he take his family back to Scotland? Was there nothing there but the calico factory, from which he had already escaped once? Was he estranged from his family? Why did he leave the army? Had he fallen in love with the country? Was his regiment being posted to someplace he didn't want to go? Or someplace his wife didn't want to go? Was he stuck in Canada because he couldn't afford to go home? Or was he just tired of it? He was still very young, after all--only 25 in 1856.

The search for answers to these and other questions should provide amusement for many years to come. In the meantime, we really have come a long way since 1994, when I started down on a mostly pleasant, but sometimes shocking trail. Our widely-held belief that we were the only ones was shattered when it was found to be a lot more widely held than we ever suspected. This shock was mostly offset by the myriad "new cousins" who turned out to be new friends - whose faith in their unique name was just as shattered as ours.

Then...

1994: The names of Matt & Liz's parents, siblings and descendants, thought to be all the Coubroughs in Canada, and possibly in the world, were pretty much all we had. My family tree had about 300 Coubroughs, all descendants of Liz Brown & Matt Coubrough. Thanks to an earlier cousin's research ⁽⁵⁾, we had Liz Brown's ancestors back for several generations. On Matt's side, however, all we had were the names of his parents and his three sisters. Of the girls, we knew that Flora, the oldest girl, had "married an Atwell, and lived near Rosetown," Minnie was "crippled and unmarried," and Barbara, the baby, had "married a Laflin and gone to the States." This was the sum of our knowledge of Matt's ancestors. It was known that Matt's dad, Jim, had been a sailor, and that he might have been in the army, but no one admitted to knowing when he had come to Canada, or when/where he had met and married Annie MacDonald. (We knew even less of Annie: no age, no birth place, not even her parents' names!) No one in the family seemed to know the names of Flora's or Barbara's husband, or the names of their children. Things were further confused by the beliefs that Matt had five sisters (Jenny, Flora Jane, Mary Ann, Minnie, and Barbara), that Barbara had two daughters named Stella and Hazel, and that Matt had himself said he was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, even though he was baptised in St. John, New Brunswick. A story persisted that he had in fact been born at Aldershot, his mother having given birth almost as soon as the ship docked in Nova Scotia. As Matt was born 8 January 1854, this story had us looking for their arrival in the wrong time frame for years, until an accidental discovery set us on the right track. Overall, the family's oral history was so skimpy that no one even knew where Jim & Annie were buried, let alone where they were born.

1997: By now, I had gathered enough new information to make a story about Jim & Annie's family. Mary Westendorp's work had been a key to my success, so I wrote up my little story as a small booklet (2 quarter-folded sheets!), which I sent to Mary for her amusement. To my astonishment, she wrote back to say that had shown it to several other people, including her mother. They were all agreed that I should write a newsletter.

Never having done such a thing before, I waffled and delayed for several months before deciding that I would try one issue. I spent my 1996 Christmas holiday filling up the first issue with whatever came to mind. Then, in January 1997, I sent 50 copies to pretty much anyone I thought might be remotely interested, and hoped for the best.

... and Now

2007: On January 1^st, we have six separate Coubrough & Cowbrough family lines in Canada, only two of them connected to us within the last 5 generations. There are dozens of living Coubroughs, in at least eight countries. I have about 6,200 Coubroughs in my database. Most of them, including all the known living ones, are in four large branches: The shortest (ours), going back only to about 1755, is James Coubrough & Jean Muir, the parents of the father of Annie MacDonald's husband, Jim. The longest is the "Ellrig" line, after its earliest known member, John of Ellrig, goes to back to about 1680. In between are the John Coubrough & Jonet Buchanan ⁽⁶⁾ line, which starts about 1703, and the Malcolm Coubrough & Marrion Reid line, which starts about the same time. These two middle branches are almost certainly connected, though proof of the relationship still eludes us. We also have numerous "strays" whose parents, spouse, or children we know, but who have not been identified with any of the four main lines.

As for Jim & Annie's children, we have known their names from the beginning, but almost nothing else. Ten years on, that has changed a bit. We know, for example, that Jim's hometown was Pollokshaws, not "Pelic Shaws," as tradition had it, in 1831, eldest of 10 children of Jean Allan & Mathew Coubrough, a colour printer in a calico factory. Jim's father, born in Thornliebank ⁽⁷⁾, in 1805, was the sixth of eight known children of Jean Muir & James Coubrough, a wright (carpenter), who had come to Thornliebank from Campsie, in about 1790. We believe Jean Allan to have been the daughter of Robert Allan & Jean Tenant, and Jean Muir to have been the daughter of James Muir & Jean Lapslie, but here the trail goes cold. Campsie parish kept no register for the 70 years before 1785, so we can't even be sure that their first son James was really their first child. We're still looking for earlier generations, but unless we uncover some kind of document telling us who the parents or siblings of Jean Muir's husband were, we may never get any further back than we are now.

Our knowledge of Annie McDonald is similarly sparse. She was born about 1824, third of Neil & Flora McDonald's seven known children. Neil & Flora are thought to have come to Cape Breton from North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, possibly in the 1830s when this island was cleared for sheep. We don't know for sure where they landed in Cape Breton, but we think they lived in the Gabarus area, near Sydney on the east coast of the island. We don't know how long they stayed, but Annie's brothers William and Coll (and maybe their parents) were in Dawn Township in 1853. They bought land there in the summer of that year, but why did they choose Dawn Township, and where did they get the cash to buy hundreds of acres outright? When the rest of the family came west, a sister named Flora stayed in Cape Breton because she was already married, but what happened to her and her children? North Uist has very few records from before the 1850s, and none that mention our Annie's family. Unless we can turn up some hitherto unknown records in Cape Breton, we will likely never know Annie's grandparents.

A lucky accident in the National Archives told us that Annie & Jim were married in Halifax, in 1851, but not why she was in Halifax, how long she had been there, or how soon they were posted to New Brunswick. Nor did it tell us when or why Jim left the Army, why he took a job as a prison guard, or why he decided to move his young family west to what is now Ontario.

Of Jim & Annie's three girls, Flora Jane, also known as Jenny, is the one we know the most about. We know she was born 1856, in Halifax. She grew up to marry an Irishman named William Atwell, a stationary engineer by trade. Along with two of his wife's relations, he ran a steam-powered sawmill in Rutherford for several years. The Atwells had nine children, three of whom died in infancy. In about 1904, Billy and his older sons went homesteading in Saskatchewan. In 1909, Jenny and her sister-in-law Liz Coubrough packed up their homes and their younger children, and took the train west to meet their husbands. Billy & Flora Jane settled near Elrose, Saskatchewan, where they lived out their days, and where they are both buried. Most of their children later moved to British Columbia, whence the other branches of their mother's family have lost track of them.

Of Jim & Annie's middle daughter Mary Ann, also known as Minnie, we still know very little more than her name. She was 22 when the 1881 census said she could speak English, but recorded her as mentally handicapped ("idiot," in those less politically correct days). In 1901, at the age of 42, she was still living at home, dependant on her parents, and apparently unable to care for herself. Flora Jane's bequest from their mother's 1902 will included the title to the family farm and Minnie's care. The farm was sold as soon as their father died, but we know nothing more about Minnie: not even whether she was still living in 1909, when Flora Jane came west.

Barbara was much harder to track down than her sister Jenny. In the beginning, all I knew was that she had "gone to the States," a pretty big place to search for a person whose name is uncertain. Someone eventually sent me a picture, thought to be Barbara, with a photographer's imprint from Minneapolis, Minnesota . At last, I had a starting place, but even so, I spent five fruitless year searching. I eventually found a death certificate, which gave her husband's name, Aden Laflin. Once I had that, it was a simple matter to track them in the census and get the names of their children: Clifford, James, and Gertrude ⁽⁸⁾

. We had known she was still at home in the spring of 1881, but gone by 1891, but not why, or exactly when. It wasn't until another cousin found my website that I learned any more. We figured out that Barbara had left home as a young woman, in about 1884, apparently to go to work for a "rich farmer" who had married a friend of hers. The farmer was said to be a neighbour of Aden Laflin, also a well-established farmer, whose family had been in Minnesota for nearly 40 years. What we don't know, and probably never will, is why she felt the need to marry a widower nearly as old as her father, and apparently bad-tempered, to boot. She died in 1915, three days after her husband, and both are buried in the Walnut Grove cemetery, in Hennepin county, Minnesota. As with Flora Jane, Barbara's children have lost all contact with their mother's family.

I haven't found out all this stuff myself, of course. I could never have got this far, were it not for all the other researchers, living and otherwise, who have added the results of their labours. Not the least of these was the family tree created by Judy Greenwood and her sister Mary Westendorp, which contained the names of Matt & Liz's parents and their siblings, as well as the names of all their known descendants. Growing up, as I did, hundreds of miles from the ancestral estates in Saskatchewan, and from the cousins thereon, I would never have been able to collect all that information. The other early source which saved us much labour was an old genealogy, known informally as the "Ellrig papers." I received my copy from John Coubrough, of Dillon, Colorado, in about 1996, but the original was prepared by one Henry Manuel, in 1880. In addition to all the known descendants of William Coubrough & Mary Moir, it also gave the names of William's parents, John of Ellrig and Helen Stevenson.

In 1994, when I first took up this search again, the Internet was in its infancy. There was very little information on-line, and what there was could be hard to find. I soon found, though, that there were other people as interested as I was (obsessed, some would say) in finding their Coubrough ancestors, and doing it on the Internet. One of the first people I came in contact with was John Coubrough, of Dillon. It didn't take us long to find that we were shirt-tail relations, from the same branch of the tribe. As exciting as this was, one might say that it was the first pin in the balloon. Both having grown up certain we were the only ones in the world, it was a bit of a start to learn we were not.

Our second discovery was that we had both, independently and based on the records we saw, come to the conclusion that everyone bearing the Coubrough name must be related somewhere along the way. Our recognition of this crucial point set us on the road to where we are today. Thousands of common ancestors, and living, breathing Coubroughs, in at least eight countries, on five continents have, I think, routed the exclusivity myth we all grew up with.

As to this newsletter, after such a long search, new discoveries are getting fewer and further between, and I'm running out of things to write about (witness the blether in this edition!). Interest, having waxed and waned over the years, now seems to have permanently declined. (My list of paid subscribers is very short, mostly the loyal folks who have been with me from the start.) In the foreseeable future, publication may be reduced to once a year or cease altogether. There are apparently still a few people who to enjoy my ramblings, though, and once a year or so I get a letter telling me of someone's new grandchild (don't forget to send me your news!), so while the end may be near, it's not quite yet.

The way we live

Over the past few years, our "time machine" has shown us many aspects of our ancestors' lives that we won't see in our own daily round. In our age of supermarkets and municipal water supplies, it's hard to imagine a life where you have to grow and store enough food to last a whole year, or where you feed your children ale because you're afraid to drink the water. But what if our time machine could bring those ancestors to our time? Beyond the obvious changes, like electricity and internal combustion engines, our ancestors would probably be completely flummoxed by things we take for granted.

Standards of housekeeping have changed over the centuries. Not only the foods we eat, but the ways we store and prepare them; the clothes we wear, and the ways we look after them; our levels of cleanliness, and how we obtain them; even some of the jobs we do, would be barely recognisable to most of the people who came before us.

Food

Black tea, dear to the hearts of our British cousins, was completely unknown to our early 17^th-century British forebears. Introduced to England in the late 1650s, tea was such an expensive luxury that it was kept in a locked chest, to which only the lady of the house had the key. In 1660, the year Jonet Buchanan's husband was born, a single pound of China tea sold in London for the equivalent of about $2000 ⁽⁹⁾. It seems unlikely that even important farmers, as John and Jonet's family likely were, consumed very many cups!

One of tea's most common adjuncts is another New World product. There are rumours that sugar was used in the kitchens of the English King, Henry III, as early as 1284. Fifty years later, sugar was in more general use, but it was still hugely expensive--about $100 a pound. Like tea, it was kept in special locked boxes. When Britain took the West Indies from Spain, in 1655, they also took over the sugar plantations and refineries. Sugar became cheaper, but was so heavily taxed that it was still only the wealthy who could afford it. Until the 1870s, when the tax was finally lifted, probably very few of our Coubrough ancestors had sugar on their parritch.

Other foods our Scots ancestors may have heard of but most likely never saw on their own tables include avocados, potatoes, maize (corn), tomatoes, and chocolate, all of which were fetched home from "the Americas," by explorers of various stripes. Maize, or what we know as corn, was from the east coast of North America, while potatoes and tomatoes grew wild in the Andes. Avocados, peppers and chocolate all made their way from Mexico to Europe, by way of Spain, and Spanish explorers. Originally, the folks at home were suspicious of these new plants and it was decades before any great inroads in the British diet.

Sir Francis Drake is sometimes credited with introducing both potatoes and tobacco to England. The potato was initially considered poisonous, due to its being closely related to nightshade. By the late 18^th-century, people had figured out how easy the potato was to grow, and how well it managed in poor, worn out soil, and that while the leaves and stems could make you sick, the tubers were perfectly safe--and tasty, too. In a poor family, where there was nothing else to eat, a working man might consume 10 or more pounds of the tubers in a single day. Because it was prolific and easy to grow, people came to depend upon it. Aside from hilling, spuds could pretty much be ignored after planting, giving the householder much more time to work at earning a living. In some areas, notably Ireland, the potato had squeezed out most other crops within a few years. This lack of diversity, coupled with poor food distribution systems and high tariffs on grain, eventually caused the starvation deaths of thousands of people. Thousands more, fleeing starvation and destitution at home, changed the North American demographic forever.

Tomatoes, known as "love apples, and also related to nightshade, were grown for their pretty red fruit, as they were thought to be poisonous, as indeed the stems and leaves can be. By the mid-1800s, however, the fruit was being eaten pickled, fried, stewed, or cooked into sauces of all sorts. They were only rarely eaten uncooked ⁽¹⁰⁾. Raw foods were thought to be bad for the digestion, and only the staunchest of "cast iron stomachs" dared to eat them.

The grain we know as corn was unknown in Europe before about 1600 or so. (Even today, many Scots consider it fit only for livestock.) British use of the word corn predates the arrival of North American grain by many years, but they didn't mean the same thing to them as it does to us. In most of Britain, corn was a sort of generic term that meant any small grain, including wheat, oats, rye, flax barley ⁽¹¹⁾. The general term included the little yellow kernels, so maize was adopted for the specific type of grain. Incidentally, this non-specific use of the word corn is the origin of "corned beef." Salt crystals, thought to resemble grain, or "corns", gave their name to the beef that was soaked in their brine.

The avocado story is similar to the other foods. They have been grown in California only since 1871, but are thought to have originated in Southern Mexico about seventeen, centuries before Europeans appeared there. Peppers seem to have made their way to Europe for the same reason as many other foods--the men who took them home had got used to eating them on their journeys, much as the use of curries and other Indian spices entered British cooking during their occupation of India.

Our James and Jean might have heard of chocolate--maybe even tasted it--but they certainly never ate a chocolate bar. Chocolate had been brought to Spain from Mexico in about 1528, but didn't reach England for another 132 years. From then until 1849, chocolate was nearly always consumed in liquid form; at the equivalent of nearly $60 Canadian for a single pound, it was an exotic drink, like coffee and tea, reserved for those who didn't need all their money just to live. You could buy cocoa and drinking chocolate, which was sold in pressed blocks. When you wanted a drink, you scraped some off the block and mixed it with hot water or milk, but probably not sugar. I'm not sure if this was because they hadn't thought of that yet, or because sugar was still too expensive. Either way, despite it's status as a luxury drink, 19^th-century hot chocolate is probably not a treat we would have enjoyed.

In Europe, chocolate was nearly always consumed in liquid form, until 1849, when John Cadbury is said to have invented the chocolate bar. We probably wouldn't have found his "chocolate for eating" all that appetising, either. A rather dry mixture of chocolate and cocoa butter, with little or no sugar, and it was not unlike the unsweetened dark chocolate now sold for baking. And if you didn't like dark chocolate, too bad for you: It's the only kind there was until 1875, when a Swiss manufacturer named Daniel Peters added powdered milk to his "chocolate for eating" to create the first milk chocolate bar.

Tobacco, while not strictly a food, would have been familiar to James and Jean, and even to the Ellrigs. Arriving in Europe with Christopher Columbus's return from his 1492 voyages, it probably didn't reach Britain for another 70 years or so, when Sir Francis Drake brought the first tobacco plants home to England. It was, at the time, seen as a cure for many diseases. In the way of cash-hungry governments, Britain's King James VI & I was only the first of a long line of governments to see it as a source of taxes. His government, like most other European powers of the day, tried to control the tobacco trade, and the taxes that went with it. As early as 1604, scholars (including James VI) were writing tracts and making speeches to try to curb its use for medicinal purposes, stressing its addictive properties and the "black soot" it left in your lungs. They might as well have saved their ink. By the 1680s, North American production of tobacco for sale in Europe was more than 25 million pounds, up from about 200,000 pounds in the 1620s. Cigars, made from whole leaves rolled tightly together, date from the early 1700s in Europe. Cigarettes--cheap, shredded leaves wrapped in thin paper--appeared in the 1840s. They are thought by some to have been introduced by Mexican cowboys to their southern US counterparts, though others believe they were invented in France. Thus while some of our better-off ancestors might have smoked a pipe in the 1700s, which was the British fashion, or even cigars, the earliest ones almost certainly never had a cigarette.

Of course, some of the food we eat now would be recognised by our ancestors. They might even recognise the way we cook it. That said, though, they would certainly be shocked, to say the least, by the variety we enjoy, and by who is allowed--or can afford--to eat what. The quality of some familiar foods would be different, too.

Raised wheat bread, for example, is something most of us take for granted, whether we buy it or bake it ourselves. That would be a surprise to our people from the past--both in that everyone eats it and that you can buy it cheaply. Leavened bread of any sort was pretty much non-existent before the 16^th century in Europe. At first, it was a catch-as-catch-can affair, with yeast made from spores in the air, similar to sourdough. Later, when baker's yeast was available, strictly enforced monopoly laws made its use by any person, other than professional bakers, dangerously illegal. In return, bakers were, eventually, obliged to give honest measure for their price ⁽¹²⁾.

In the 17^th century, wheat bread, especially the soft white bread, was reserved for rich people. Ordinary folk ate bread made from any or all of oats, barley, or rye, which though they made it themselves, was baked in a communal oven. (You were required by law to use the local laird's oven--and pay for the privilege.) The taste and texture of this dark, sour bread were not unlike the bread sold today as "German Pumpernickel. The heavy loaves had a sort of stick-to-your-ribs quality, which the white bread didn't, but it had other, less wholesome ingredients, which the white bread also didn't have. Until nearly the end of the 19^th century, rain was ground between two stones, either huge round stones at the local mill, or by hand in a quern ⁽¹³⁾. White flour was sifted to remove the bits of bran and hulls that are part of the grain, but detract from its pure whiteness. This sifting would naturally remove any bits of dirt, stone, straw, insects, etc., that had made their way into the grain. Grain ground at home, or meant to be consumed by poor folks wouldn't have been sifted. The nutritious bran would remain, but so would any bits of stone, etc. Under these circumstances, it's not hard to imagine why folks' teeth were worn out by the time they were 30 or 40.

Regardless of rank or position, most people ate the same types of food. The difference between rich and poor was a matter of quantity and quality. Nobility and wealthy merchants ate the same sorts of food as their labourers, but where an average family might have one plain boiled fish, washed down with ale, the laird's meal might have several types of fish, as well as one or more meat dishes, prepared in different ways, with sweets for desert, and all washed down with wine. The other big difference was that, except in times of famine, the upper classes had enough to eat, and many of the poor didn't. Wealthy people might have several types of meat for each meal, while folks further down the social scale might be lucky to have meat once a week. If you were at the bottom of the heap, you might never taste it in your whole life. For the great majority of people, for most of the year, meat or fish, was dried, smoked, or salted. Even as late as James and Jean's day, at the end of the 18^th century, ordinary people having fresh meat on the table two or three times a day, every day, would be shocking.

For folks who did get to eat meat, the way it was prepared--or even the type of meat itself--was often different from what we might do today. Not many of us today would consider, for example, having roast sparrow for dinner. Plain fare, though, could be strikingly similar. Stew is a simple meal, tasty and comforting, but easily prepared in a single pot--a fact as much a virtue today as when we owned only one pot. Some old recipes have ingredients, like the "straw-berrie" leaves in this stew, that we find odd, not because they are no longer common, as is sometimes the case, but because we no longer have to make use of every possible bit of edible material. Not only do tastes change, but we can now afford to be choosy. The first recipe given here is from 1674 (language has been updated a bit), and the second from a modern cookbook. Despite a 300-year difference in publication dates, the herbs used for flavouring constitute the main difference in these recipes.

Potage of Mutton, Veal or Beef in the English fashion (1674)

Cut a Rack of Mutton in two pieces, and take a Knuckle of Veal and boil it with good store of Herbs, with a pint of Oatmeal chopped amongst them, let your Herbs be Tyme, sweet Marjoram, Parsley, Sives ⁽¹⁴⁾, Succory, Marry-golds, Strawberrie and Violet-leaves, Beets, Borrage, Sorrel, Blood-wort, Sage, Penniroyal, with a little Salt; being well boil'd, serve them on carved Sippets, with the meat in the midst thereof.

Brown lamb on all sides in oil, in a saucepan, over high heat. Remove excess fat. Add balance of ingredients except for barley and parsley. Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer 30 minutes. Add barley and cook over low heat until lamb is tender, about 1 hour. Garnish with parsley and serve.

Housekeeping

Housewives can be imaginative creatures. Be she ever so inventive, though, the number of ways to cook supper in a home with a single iron pot over an open fire is rather limited. Her choices of food to cook in that pot also comprise a rather narrow range. She would have been familiar with some of the choices available to her 21^st-century counterpart, but other modern options might have been somewhat shocking.

Most of our ancestors would have been familiar with salted and dried foods of one sort or another. People from northern latitudes would certainly have known that freezing food would help it keep. Our ancestral housewife was familiar with markets, too. She could buy fresh vegetables and meats, but she expected to grow most of her family's requirements, preserve as much as possible of the summer's produce for the coming winter. She did not shop every day, as some of her descendants do.

The king, who collected a share of the profits from most markets, had the final say over who could have a market. Not every town had one, and the king decreed how often they ran, and what they could sell. As a mark of royal favour, some towns were given rights to their own markets, which meant they got to keep the profits for local use, but this was rare. In large towns, like Glasgow, and Edinburgh, markets might run once a week. In smaller places, they ran only once a month, or once a quarter. Going to a shop, in the dead of winter, to choose among dozens of types of fresh vegetables and pieces of ready-to-cook meat, would be inconceivable.

To our 17^th-century ancestors, the idea of putting a frozen meal, inflammable paper box and all, into a metal box, then pressing a button to cook it--without fire and without burning either the food or its box--would have been somewhere between ridiculous and dangerously deranged. They would, however, at least recognise some of the concepts. Frozen meals, electricity, and paper boxes are all examples of technology improving things our ancestors knew in a different form.

People must have been aware of electricity from the time they learned to wear furs. As any cat who has ever been stroked on a winter day could tell you, fur is an excellent source of static electricity. Understanding it took a bit longer. In 1600, when few Europeans, except fishermen, had been to Canada, a man named Gilbert figured out that electricity was related to magnetism. In 1792, the Malcolm Coubrough who married Ann Henderson was a small boy, James & Jean Muir had been in Thornliebank for a couple of years, and Alessandro Volta found that electricity could be made to flow from one point to another, in a current. In 1831, when England's Michael Faraday combined these two ideas in the first crude electric generator, the use of electricity to freeze food was still another 100 years in the future.

Modern paper, too, is the result of much technological advance. From its invention, in China, around 150 BC, paper has used various kinds of plant fibres, soaked in water and beaten by hand. The resulting slurry would be hand-dipped with a small screen to create individual sheets of paper. The amount of time and effort needed for a single sheet makes it easy to see why paper was so expensive that it was used only for important purposes such as books, or the letters of important people.

Europe began importing paper from the Middle East by about the 10^th century, but it was over 200 years before it was manufactured there. In fact, paper was feared, at first, and despised as an outrider of Muslim invasion. This fear is thought to have been the reason that, in 1221, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, decreed that any documents written on paper were not valid. One might be forgiven for thinking that lobbying by wealthy 13^th-century "cattle barons" had something to do with an edict that all official documents must be on vellum--a writing material that just happens to be made from sheep and cattle hides. Things might have remained in this state, were it not for another technological advance: Vellum, or parchment, as it was also known, was not suitable for machine printing; the rise of the printing press, in the late 1400s, brought paper into vogue.

As a writing surface, the demise of parchment was a slow decline, rather than sudden death. Vellum remained the "high-end" choice for another five centuries. Until the advent of high-quality computer printers, in the 1980s, important documents, including university diplomas, continued to be handwritten on parchment. Even today, a diploma, especially from a prestigious university, is sometimes referred to as a "sheepskin."

Paper was not manufactured on any great scale in Scotland until 1590, when Mungo and Gideon Russell opened a mill near Edinburgh. There were only 12 paper mills in all Scotland before 1700. Generally, any paper required for printing books, etc., was imported from continental Europe, a fact that didn't make it any cheaper. Even after mills were established, making paper remained a labourious process of creating individual sheets in much the same manner as the Chinese had done it 16 centuries before. It would take the full force of the Industrial Revolution to turn paper into the cheap throw-away we take for granted today.

In the 1850s, a German paper maker discovered that he could use cellulose from wood pulp to make paper. Not long after, someone had the bright idea of using chemicals, instead of brute force, to break down the fibres. Today, paper is made in huge machines. The slurry is made in tanks holding millions of litres and poured onto moving screens that drain, press, and dry the paper. The resulting "sheets" of paper, 15 feet wide, are stored on rolls weighing 20 tons. The steps for making our microwave dinner's cardboard box, the paper napkin you wipe your face with, the paper bag your take-out dinner comes in, and the ubiquitous white computer paper are all pretty much the same as for the small, thick sheets the Chinese hand-dipped in 150 BC. But one thing is definitely different: No 16^th-century housewife would have considered serving dinner on paper dishes--let alone wasting all that paper in the bathroom!

Clothes

Clothes were different, too. If getting a new dress meant shearing the sheep, washing the wool, spinning it into yarn, weaving it into cloth, then cutting or tearing it into rectangles for hand-stitching into sleeves, skirt, and bodice, the idea of going to a shop to choose from several thousand ready-made items might be dismissed as somewhere between a pipe dream and the raving of a lunatic. It certainly wouldn't be considered an everyday occurrence.

For all but the very wealthiest, having different clothes for summer and winter, was a thought that never crossed their minds. Most folks had only locally-made cloth, and maybe not much of that. They would have new clothes only once every year or two, and not everyone in the family would have new clothes at the same time. All the wool from as many as six sheep might be consumed in the cloth for a single kilt for one man. If your family had fewer than six sheep, it would be a while before everyone got a new outfit.

Better-off people might not have made their cloth themselves, but whether by the family's women or by a tailor, clothes were all hand-made. Ready-to wear men's clothes became available around the middle of the 19^th century, but women's and children's (especially girls') clothes continued to be made at home for another forty years or so.

The cloth itself was nothing like we know. Today's machine-spun and machine-woven fabrics--even the cheap prints sold for children's clothes--would have been thought very fine, as indeed they are when compared to most hand-woven cloth. Anything in the range of working-class pocketbooks would have been rather coarse, for any of several reasons, the main one being cost. The adage "time is money" was as true then as it is now: The finer a product was, the more time and effort it took to make. More time and effort equals more cost, even when made of local material like leather, wool or flax (linen). The cloth made from hand-spun yarn would not be any warmer, or wear any better than their modern equivalents, but they would be thicker and heavier than we are used to.

Styles of clothing have varied over the centuries, even more than the materials they were made of. Besides the obvious need to clothe ourselves for warmth, fashion is based on religious beliefs, available technology, location, and the general state of the economy, as well as the individual wealth of the wearer. For example, people living in a warm place, or in a settled environment, could manage nicely when loosely wrapped in a long, gown-type garment. If you lived further north, surviving by hunting, you might appreciate the extra warmth and freedom of movement afforded by garments that fit closer to the legs, akin, perhaps, to trousers. As late as the mid-1800s, clothes were often made of assorted sizes of rectangles stitched together, with little triangle gussets to make them fit the body. The set-in sleeves we know must be cut on the diagonal of the grain--both wasteful and technically difficult with primitive tools ⁽¹⁵⁾.

In the past, in some places, there were also regulations about who was allowed to wear what. In the Middle Ages, merchants of the rising middle class were often richer than the nobility, or even the king. They could afford to dress in a style that showed off that wealth. Needless to say, this didn't always set well with either the church or the men who considered themselves socially superior to mere pedlars. Another concern was that money wasted on fine clothes would not be available to the king's coffers for the care and feeding of armies, etc. The nobles, who could make the laws to suit themselves, passed sumptuary laws dictating how expensive a person's clothes could be, and what fabrics could be worn by whom. ⁽¹⁶⁾

How could the king or the bishop maintain his status, if every Tom, Dick, and Harry could dress more expensively than him? The solution? Laws against wearing the wrong clothes. Dressing above one's station was punishable by fines, excommunication, and other nastiness.

These laws, incidentally, are the reason kings in children's books are often shown wearing purple velvet robes, trimmed with black-spotted white fur. Hand-cut velvet was a labour-intensive fabric, usually made of imported silk. The dye known as "royal purple ⁽¹⁷⁾" could be made only in small quantities. It would have taken several weeks to dye enough cloth (20 metres, or more) for a man's cloak. The spotted fur is ermine, the winter pelt of the weasel. Weasels being very small animals, a trimmed pelt wouldn't be more than about 8 inches long, by 3 wide. It's not hard to see that the number of pelts needed to trim a man's cloak, plus the time needed to work the tips of all the tails into the spotted pattern, would make a purple velvet cloak the purview of very rich men.

Perhaps one of the most important influences on fashion was one we don't often think of: the technology that made a shift from natural to man-made textiles possible. Our Jean Muir and her ancestors were familiar with clothes of fur, wool, leather and linen. Clothes made of wood pulp or sticky, stinky black tar from the ground ⁽¹⁸⁾ never crossed their minds, but they have radically changed the way we dress. Jean Muir may have dreamed of clothes that never wore out, or a winter cloak that didn't weigh more than she did, but I don't suppose she held out hope of their becoming a reality. I doubt it ever occurred to her that her 5^th-great grandchildren would be drinking a concoction of sugar, and fizzy water, let alone that they would be wearing clothes made of the bottles it came in.

The way we work

Most of us have a pretty good idea what a farmer does, and how he does it. A farmer of 400 years ago would probably recognise the way his descendants work the land. Until mechanization began, in the early 1900s, the most one man could expect to farm by himself was about 10 acres, and few farms would have been big enough to graze more than a couple of dozen animals. Our 17^th-century farmer might be a bit shocked by the size of both modern fields and modern herds, but he would know what to do with them.

The same goes for his wife. She would recognise the milk cow, and the vegetable garden. She would be able to get by in the kitchen. Even if it might take her a while to figure out the stove, she could likely put a meal on the table.

But what about the family's children? The girls would have learned to cook and clean, milk the cow and feed the chickens, the same as their 21^st-century cousin, but would they recognise the office she goes to every morning--a huge tower, bigger than the tallest cathedral tower, with walls made of glass--where she sits at a desk and presses buttons with strange wiggly marks on. When she presses those buttons, strange wiggly marks appear on the square, lighted box that she stares at all day.

If our ancestors would be stymied by some of the ways we earn a living today, some of their jobs have disappeared so completely that we have a hard time imagining that anyone could ever have made a living at them. Something as common as envelopes, for example. We think of them as mere wrappers, whose sole purpose is to protect their contents. Millions of them fall off conveyor belts in paper factories every day. In the mid-19^th century, though envelopes were a new invention, they had suddenly become a requirement, due to the new postal system. And they were handmade. Trades I have seen in the census records (not attached to Coubroughs) include "envelope folder" and "envelope flap gluer." Imagine how many envelopes you might have to fold in a day to make enough money to eat.

Even with the benefit of history books, a journey to the dirt and discomfort of the past might be more than we bargained for--but maybe not more shocking than for the folks in our past to come forward and see what we have built by standing on their shoulders.

Niagara Catherine's daddy

Last time, I told you about the Malcolm Coubrough who was in the 1851 census of Niagara, Canada being a member of the Royal Canadian Regiment, still in operation today. I had the name right, but it is not the same regiment that still serves today.

Malcolm's unit, originally known as the Royal Canadian Veterans Regiment, was created in 1840. Later the same year, the unit was renamed the Royal Canadian Regiment. Sometime later still, the unit was again renamed, to Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment, the name used until disbanding in 1870. After the War of 1812, the British army suffered greatly from desertion, among other discipline problems, on frontier posts along the US border, including Niagara. The Royal Canadian Rifle companies were manned mostly by long-service ⁽¹⁹⁾, regular army, British soldiers, who would be less likely to desert if they were close to retirement and stood to lose their pensions. Land being high on the list of rewards for actually finishing one's contract, more than 540 of these men stayed in Canada after their service. Over half of them continued to serve in local militias. Perhaps Malcolm was one of them?

In the 1851 census, Malcolm was noted as belonging to the "R.C.R." It was this abbreviation that led to my mistake. The modern Royal Canadian Regiment, also known by these initials, stood up in 1883. It is not historically connected to the Rifles. My apologies for any confusion (and for my inability to spell Niagara).

Other branches

1. Quite some time ago, we found that Arthur Coubrough, son of William Coubrough & Margaret McKim married Ann Jane Morrisson, in Glasgow, in 1906. On 24 August 1912, Ann packed up her children and stepped aboard the SS California. Ann, with Ellen, 3-1/2, and Arthur, 10 months, had taken her first step on a journey that would end in Chicago, where her husband had gone to work the year before. It truly was a new beginning. Arthur and Ann became naturalised US citizens, and their third child, Margaret, was born in Chicago in about 1914. The family had its share of tragedy, too. Their only son, Arthur McKim, died in 1915, at the age of only 5 years. The family missed him deeply, publishing memoriam notices in the Chicago Tribune for a number of years after his death. Their daughters both married, Ellen to a McGovern, and Margaret to a Richard F. Ruh, but I don't know if they had any children. Ellen & Margaret's father was a widower when he died in Chicago, 15 September 1961, aged about 78, but I don't know exactly when he lost his wife.

2. Robert McKim Coubrough second son of William Coubrough and Margaret McKim, married Maria Akhurst Edwards in 1898, in East Grinstead, Sussex, England. Their daughter, Marie Margaret, was born in Brighton, England, in 1899; followed a little over a year later by her brother, Robert McKim, born January 1901, also in Brighton. On September 6, 1923, Robert and his family boarded the SS Tyrenia at Southampton, England to follow his baby brother, Arthur, to Chicago. According to Robert's 8 May 1958 obituary in the Suburban Economist, Robert was "a wood carver who came to this country [USA] 35 years ago from Scotland." His widow outlived him by only a few months, dying 24 September 1958.

Robert and Maria's two children both married: Marie, in about 1924, to a Donald P. Willmott, and Robert in about 1922, to an Ellen Elizabeth Johnson. The Willmotts don't appear to have had any children, but Robert & Ellen had two sons: Robert McKim, about 1923, in England, and Thomas C., about 1927, in Chicago. When Ellen died in 1944, her obituary said that she was the mother of "the late Robert McKim, Jr.," so she must have lost her older son, but I don't have any other details.

3. Most of Margaret McKim's children seem to have ended up in the United States. One of the first to go was her daughter Bethia, who had married Joseph Foy, in Glasgow, in 1899. In 1909, Joseph, a carpenter, had gone to Chicago to work. He appears to have been home for a visit in 1911, returning to the US in February of that year. He may also have been home between then and 12 May 1912, when Bethia and her five oldest children (James, 11, Margaret, 9, George, 7, Josephine, 6, and 5-month-old Arthur), arrived in New York, on their way to Chicago. It must have been a happy reunion, as their last child, daughter Irene D., was born there in about October 1913. I haven't yet found much about their children, but Joseph and Bethia seem to have moved from Chicago to California sometime after the 1930 census. Joseph died in Los Angeles on 14 December 1951. Bethia followed a year later, on 11 December 1952, also in Los Angeles.

4. Last time, I told you about Robert Coubrough, born in France, in 1817, to Malcom & Catherine Coubrough. I also talked about Malcolm & Catherine, parents of Catherine, born 1851, in Niagara, Canada. While it's still too early to say for sure, there is a possibility that these men were brothers. They were close to the same age, and are both possibly sons of Malcolm C & Catherine McCoull. Their daughter Catherine was born in Glasgow, in 1815, and Catherine McCoull's Malcolm seems to have been a soldier. We're still looking for proof, but the circumstantial evidence seems to point this way.

5. In the 1861 census for Fife, a 9-year-old scholar named Alfred Coubrough lives at what appears to be either a boarding school or a boarding house for children at school, at 77 North Street, St. Andrews. Little Alfred, sixth child of Anthony Park & Hannah Butler Coubrough, was the only one of his name in the house. His 14-year-old brother, Adam, lived in a similar home at Clifton Bank, in the same city, and possibly not far away. Also in the house with Adam were Thomas & James Coubro'. Sons of James Boyd & Margaret Potter Coubro', of the Ellrig line, James & Thomas were probably not directly related to Adam & Alfred. For all sorts of convoluted reasons that I don't pretend to understand, boys were commonly sent to boarding schools, ⁽²⁰⁾ if their parents could afford it. Nine years seems to have been the magic number for sending them away, so it was quite possibly little Alfred's first year away from home. Today, it's only a couple of hours drive from Adam & Alfred's home in Strathblane to St. Andrews. In 1861, it would have been somewhat more arduous, but possibly only a train ride. Alfred was born in India, but his parents seem to have been back in Scotland by the following year, when their youngest son, Harold, was born in Strathblane. James & Thomas's parents were probably still living in England in 1861, so St. Andrews would have been a real journey for them. As for why they were all at the same school, who knows? It might have been a popular place for boys of their class, they might have known a relationship to each other that has since been forgotten, or it might just have been a coincidence.

6. Late in 1883, a Mary Maria Atha married one Henry Coubrough, in the city of Leeds, Yorkshire, England. In the 1891 census, Henry Coubrough , a 46-year-old wine merchant, lives in Leeds with his wife Mary M. and their two sons: Robert S. and Henry C. Coubrough. The census says that Mary and her sons were all born in Yorkshire, and that her husband was born in Stirlingshire, Scotland; it doesn't add that he was the eldest son of William Coubrough & Margaret Dawson, of the Ellrig line. In the FreeBMD index of births in England, I found entries for both a Robert Sheldon (1884) and a Henry Clifford (1886) Coubrough, in Leeds. I haven't seen the certificates, but these match the ages, names and locations of Henry & Mary's boys, making them likely candidates.

Of Margaret Dawson's eight children, Henry is the fifth whose fate we have learned. Of the others:

Catherine, the second child, married William Alexander, and had one daughter before she died in 1875, aged about 29;

James, the fourth child, died in 1865, at the age of 9 years;

Elizabeth, fifth child, married Charles Johnson, and had 3 children of her own: Margaret Coubrough, b abt 1885; Annie Bryce, b abt 1887, and William Coubrough, b abt 1888;

Robert, Margaret Dawson's youngest, died at 27 years, in 1891, leaving no family; and

Margaret, John, and Jane, third, sixth and seventh children, have not yet been tracked down.

7. On 18 February 1809, in Lanchester, Durham, England, a sailor called Malcolm Coubrough, married a local girl named Ann Henderson. They had at a son, Charles, born 1811, in Sunderland, Durham; and a daughter, Mary Ann, born the following year in London. They may also have had another daughter, but I haven't yet found her name.

The census records insist Malcom was born in Scotland. So far, the only guy with the right name at the right time was Rabbina Reid & Malcolm Coubrough's son, born 10 September 1790, in Glasgow. We do know that his children were both married in Sunderland: Charles to Jane Thornton, in the summer of 1839, and Mary Ann to Thomas Bewick, 21 March 1836.

Charles Coubrough & Jane Thornton had five children:

Thomas Thornton, b 1840, m. Elizabeth Holmes in 1861, & had 3 daughters: Elizabeth, Mary Ann, & Margaretta;

Elizabeth Ann, b abt 1842, m. John Gamble, and had five children: Jane Hannah, Charles Cowbrough, Jane Hannah, Mary Elizabeth, & Richard Smithson. Both girls named Jane died before their first birthdays;

Malcolm, b abt 1844, an ironworker, m. Elizabeth Pearson in 1873, and had six kids: Charles, 1874; Mary Jane, 1876; Malcolm, 1878; Elizabeth Ann, 1881; Lily, 1883; and Margaret, 1885;

Mary Jane, b abt 1848, m. George Reece in 1871, and had Thomas Thornton, John David, Charles, James William, Sarah J., and John David; and

Charles, born in mid-1850, died early in 1854, aged only 3 years.

Mary Ann & Thomas Bewick, a cordwainer, had at least three children:

Charles, in 1837, in Sunderland; Elizabeth in about 1843 and Martin ⁽²¹⁾ in about 1845, both in London. In the 1841 census, Mary Ann's son Charles was living with his grandmother, Ann Henderson Coubrough, while his parents were in London. Perhaps the little boy was company for his grandmother, whose husband was so often at sea. The 1851 census has Ann and Malcolm, retired seaman, at home together, in Sunderland. Ann died there in 1857, and her husband went to live with their daughter, soon after. Aged 75, he is living with Mary Jane & Thomas Bewick, in the 1861 census. Malcolm himself died in 1869, aged 80.

As for Thomas & Mary Ann, none of their children were at home in 1861. Mary Ann's father was the only other occupant of the home. In 1871, a widower named Thomas Bewick, 59, was living with his son, Malcolm, and Malcolm's wife, Isabella (23). Malcolm, 27, was a seaman, which fits with the family's sea-going tendency, and his father was a shoemaker (aka cordwainer), but I can't be sure this was our Thomas. If this is our Thomas, his wife must have died between the 1861 & 1871 censuses. I haven't yet found what happened to either of Thomas & Mary Ann's other son, Charles, or their daughter, Elizabeth. Possibly they did not survive childhood, or they may not have survived childhood.

Ann Henderson's son, Charles, died in the late fall of 1879, aged 69, in Lanchester. His widow, Jane Thornton, was visiting their daughter Elizabeth at the time of the 1881 census. By the spring of 1891, she was living with her daughter Mary Jane Reece's family. Jane died in the late fall or early winter of 1895, aged 89.

8. We have long known of the family of William Coubrough and Bethia Lancaster McMillan. We also knew that they had three sons, Malcolm, Daniel, and William Crawford. What we didn't know was they seem to have also had a daughter named Mary, born about 1851, in Glasgow. To date, we have no further information, except that she doesn't seem to have been living with her family in 1861.

9. We long ago learned that John Coubrough & Mary Boyle were married 6 October 1850, in Barony parish, Lanark, and that their son William was born 24 April 1851. What we learned only recently was that they also had a daughter, Janet, who was 7 years old in the 1851 census. Since she would have been about six years old when Mary & John were married, she was likely the biological daughter of only one of them. At this far remove, however, we can't tell whether it was Mary or John who was the step-parent.

10. William Cowburgh, son of William Cowbrough ⁽²²⁾ & Margaret Riddel, married Agnes Turnbull on 14 January 1843, in Selkirk parish, Selkirk. We had thought that they had five children: Margaret, abt 1844; William, abt 1849; Robert, abt 1852; Eliza Jane, 1856; and John Bowes, 1859 - abt 1863. According to the 1851 census for Galashiels, Melrose, Roxburgh, though, they also had a daughter named Agnes who was 8 years old. Again, we know nothing else, except that she was not with her family in 1861.

11. On a different line , we have known for some time that James C. Brown had a brother named William, who farmed in Dawn Township, not far from Jim & Annie. We also knew that William married Frances (aka Fannie) McGuire, and that they had a son named William, who died 8 October 1879, but that was about it. (His death certificate says little William was 11 months, 25 days. This should have made his birthday about 14 October, but his birth registration says he was born 2 October. Obviously someone made a mistake in a date, but it's hard to say which one.)

We have now also learned that they were married 26 May 1871, in Dawn Township; that Fannie was born 6 March 1849, in Scotland, the daughter of Francis and Rosanna McGuire; and that they had at least eight other children: John Henderson, 7 May 1871; Rosanna, abt 1874; Marion, abt 1875; Francis James, 2 Dec 1876; William, 2 Oct 1878; William Thompson, 29 Dec 1880; Violet, 4 July 1883 - 18 May 1884; George M., 27 Feb 1885, and Margaret Violet, 17 Dec 1887, all born in Dawn Township.

William & Fanny retired to Dresden, Ontario, in about 1923. William died there, of Angina Pectoris, on 9 June 1931. Fannie reported her husband's death, so she presumably outlived him by at least a few days. Their daughter Rosanna, recorded as "Rosella," married Joseph McGeachie on 5 October 1898. A month later, on 9 November 1898, her sister Marion married John James Skinner. On 31 March 1903, at Chatham, Marion's brother John married her husband's sister Christina. Fanny's son George moved to Regina, but was married in Dawn Township. He died at Dresden 19 October 1929, of "heart block and asthma."

Question corner

Here are some of the questions where we know just enough to make them intriguing.

1. Who were the Ann & William Canborough, who lived in St. Stephen, Middlesex, England, in the 1851 census? He was said to be a 70-year-old general practitioner (a doctor?), who had been born at Dalby, Leicestershire, England. His wife, Anne, aged 57, had been born at Kingston, also in Leicestershire. Also in the house were Sarah Martin, 51, sister in law to William, and, presumably, his wife's sister.

2. Was William related to the Malcolm Coubrough, died 1744, for whom I found an entry in a burial index, in Worcestershire, England? For that matter, who was Malcolm? He is so far the earliest one I have found of our name in England. I was actually a bit surprised when he turned up in a list of search results, as I didn't think there were Coubroughs in England that early. He may have been a sailor or soldier, and would have possibly been of an age to be the grandfather of the William at #1, above, or the Malcolm who married Ann Henderson, at #6, below.

3. The 1871 English census for West Houghton parish, in Lancashire, has Robert Cowbroch, 64, and his wife, Alice, 58, both born in West Houghton. Robert seems to have become a "Flac operative" ⁽²³⁾ by then, while his wife has retired. The address is the same as in the 1861 census, when Robert, 53, & Alice, 49, were both silk weavers, and where their name is Cowburn. Born about 1807, Robert may be from a previously unknown English branch of the tribe, and possibly connected to the William and/or Malcolm, above, or to Malcolm at #5, below.

Or Alice's husband might not have been a Coubrough. All but the 1871 census call him Cowburn. In 1841, Robert (40) & Alice (25) Cowburn, silk weavers, lodged in the home of Jane Kirkman, 75, silk weaver, in West Houghton. In 1851, Robert (44) & Alice (38) Cowburn still lived with Jane, now 89, and said to be a Pauper, F S W ⁽²⁴⁾. No census records show any children for Alice & Robert.

4. The Malcolm Coubrough, born about 1820, in Scotland, and died in Ontario in 1889, may have been a son of Malcom & Catherine McFarlane: Their Malcolm was born 9 May 1820, in Campsie. I am unsure whether he was the father of Niagara Catherine, b 1851, or whether it was just a coincidence that his wife was also called Catherine. If the man in Ontario was Catherine McFarlane's son, rather than Catherine McColl's, he would not be directly related to French Robert. Unless we can find a marriage certificate with his father's name, we may never know. Neither Ontario Malcolm's death certificate nor his wife's gave any parents' names. Still looking.

5. Malcolm Coubrough died in 1744, in Worcestershire, England. Who was this Malcolm? And what was he doing in Worcestershire? After 1830, the industrial revolution's great textile towns in the North of England, drew a few Coubroughs, and a Coubrough sailor or two had made his way to England. The earliest one previously known, however, (another Malcolm) didn't head south for at least 50 years after our man was buried in Worcester.

The city of Birmingham is the centre of Worcester county, in the West Midlands district, some ways north of London, but still in the far south of the country. This area being some distance from the sea, and even further from Scotland, it seems unlikely that 1744 Malcolm was an active sailor. Was he a retired sailor? Was he a soldier? Merchant? Was he the grandfather of Malcolm who married Ann Henderson? Or, more likely, the grandfather of William the doctor (above)? Was he born in England, or did he move there as an adult? Was he married? Did he have children of his own? Pretty much all we know is his name and when/where he was buried--not even how old he was or why he died. He's a man of pure mystery, but we do have some possibilities among our known Malcolms:

A. Malcom born abt July 1698, in Campsie, Stirling, second son of John C & Isobel Lyle. The parish register has a christening record for this man, but I know nothing else about him. He could have gone to England just as easily as staying at home.

B. Malcolm who married Margaret Miller is a possibility. He was born bet 1679 & 1720, and had only one child (Jonet), with Margaret Miller, in 1739. I found no record of marriage, so he & Margaret may not have been churched.

C. Malcolm who married Jonet Morrison was born sometime between 1663 and 1685. Jonet's last known child was born in 1723. If he was born close to the end of this period, and/or lived to be ancient for the time, it could have been him.

D. Malcolm who married Jean Fairie was born between abt 1669 and 1700. He and Jean were probably not church married, and their daughter, Janet, christened 1719, in Campsie, seems to have been their only child. Again, if he lived to be ancient or was born near the end of my guesstimated time, or both, he could have been in England by 1744.

E. Malcom who married Janet Calder in 1701 probably wouldn't fit here. If he was at least 19 when he married, he couldn't have been born later than 1682, and could have died as late as 1744.

These Malcolms, however, all have the same problem regarding the 1744 Worcester burial: They lived in Campsie. They were likely too far from the sea to have been sailors, but they might have been soldiers. (We have had a couple of Malcolms unexpectedly pop up in the army--perhaps it was the thing to do if your name was Malcolm Coubrough?) He may have been a merchant of some sort, or even a politician, though Worcester may have been too far from London for that.

6. The 1841 census of Bolton le Moors, in England, lists a James Caubraugh, age 30, occupation: Military. This is may be James Hannah Park Coubrough, brother of calico factory Anthony P. Was James possibly the one who knew the family of Hannah Butler, before Anthony married her? Or did Anthony's contacts wangle a cushy posting for James? Did Anthony perhaps meet Hannah when he was on a visit to his brother?

7. Who was Agnes Coubrough, age 78, cotton winder, who lived at 26 Havannah Street, Glasgow, in the 1851 census? She was the right age at the right time, and born in the right place, to have been the third daughter of Henry Coubrough and Jean Porter [or Porterfield], but that's all we know. Her parents were probably born in the 1740s, but that's all we know of them.

Reunion 2007