A New World on the Horizon

Grandma Liz, born on the farm at Rutherford, Dawn Township, Lambton County, Ontario, was 20 years old when she married the boy next door (well, okay, two doors down), and they moved five miles away, to a farm bought from her father. She was 45 in the spring of 1909, when she and her sister-in-law, Flora Jane Atwell, packed their families onto a train bound west to the Saskatchewan prairie. All that open space must have felt like a different planet from the heavily forested countryside where they had spent their whole lives, but they stayed and made new lives once more.

Grampa Matt's exact birthplace is still open to debate: He said he was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His baptism certificate says he was baptised at St. John, New Brunswick, which was given as his birthplace in the census records for the all years he lived with his parents. We may never know the exact location, but there is no doubt that he was born in what is now Canada, ⁽¹⁾ of parents born and raised in Scotland.

But why did all those parents come to Canada from Scotland in the first place? What did they leave behind, and where did they leave it? Let's try to find out.

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Why Canada?

The earliest available records tell us that the Coubrough family entered written history around the end of the 16^th century from the Campsie, Stirlingshire area of central Scotland. A few moved to England over the years, but until about the middle of the 19^th century, they didn't stray very far from home. Suddenly, starting in the 1850's, they exploded on the rest of the world. Like a bucket of popcorn with no lid, they ended up everywhere: England, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Fiji, Wales, Jamaica, Australia, Uruguay and Ireland. They were part of a mass migration saw hundreds of thousands of Scots move to new homes in other countries. There were too many reasons for this to go into them all here, but they included economics, religion, and the second industrial revolution.

The most probable reason for the Coubroughs coming to Canada was that Grandpa Matt's father, Jim, was a soldier posted here with his regiment. ⁽²⁾ In theory, soldiers were usually in the Army for life. In practice, this was often not the case, and it seems likely that Jim and Annie just decided to stay in Canada when his time was up or when the unit moved on.

The mid-1850's saw some economic hard times in Britain. Among other things, there was a widespread potato crop failure in Scotland in 1852 and 1853. While not as disastrous as the Irish potato famines of the 1840s, things were still pretty tough at home. Jim's family all slaved away in textile mills of some sort, and while they were mostly skilled labour, wages were not high, compared to the cost of living. Glasgow was a filthy, crowded city, and even in the small villages where Jim's family lived, life was not all roses. Mechanization of many factories gave rise to high unemployment. In the 1830s, there had been some labour reforms which reduced the work day from 16 (or more) hours to only 12 and increased the minimum age of employment for children to 12 or 14 years, up considerably from the previous six years. There were no minimum wage laws, no pollution controls to prevent factories dumping all sorts of raw chemicals into the rivers, no unemployment insurance, no social assistance for single mothers, and no guarantee that you would have enough to eat or a roof over your head, no matter how hard you worked. The clean air and the possession of land of one's own in Canada must have seemed too good to pass up.

Because of these hard times at home, in the 1850's the British government cut expenses by reducing its colonial armies. Many soldiers chose to stay where they were rather than go back to whatever they had joined the Army to escape in the first place. Depending on where and when they had previously served, some men (mostly officers) were given grants of land in lieu of pensions. Others received smaller amounts of land and small cash pensions. Given the expense of clearing land, this was usually the better option. Judging by the fact that Jim and Annie seem to have bought their farm, they do not seem to have qualified for these grants, though he may possibly have had a very small pension. The British Army was not notably generous with its pensions for enlisted men, even if they were incapacitated or killed during their military service.

In 1843, there occurred in the Scots church what became known as the "Great Schism." At that time, the "Established Church of Scotland" was the main, state-approved institution, and one of its features was that of "patronage" which allowed the local laird to appoint a minister to the parish church, whether the congregation liked that minister or not. Some members of some congregations did not care for this idea, and in 1843, the members of one congregation decided they weren't going to put up with a pastor they didn't like. They walked out of the church one Sunday and chose their own pastor. Because they reserved the right to this freedom to chose, they called themselves the "Free Church of Scotland." All this to say that Jim and Annie told the Canadian census-takers that they were members of the Free Church of Scotland, so perhaps this is one of the reasons why they were not anxious to go back, and why Annie's family had also left. It was not a common practice to marry outside the family church in those days, and anyone who did was usually considered an outcast. If Jim and Annie belonged to the Free Church, her parents probably did, too.

By 1858, when Jim and Annie and their two-and-two-thirds children ⁽³⁾ moved to Dawn Township, Annie's family had already been settled there for nearly five years. The overland journey to Ontario was by no means easy (though they could have travelled at least as far as Toronto by water) but it was undoubtedly more attractive than a trip across the North Atlantic in the dead of winter. Annie's family was fairly well off, judging by the amount of land they seem to have paid cash for, so it was probably a lot easier for Jim and Annie to go West and settle near her family than it was to travel back to Scotland, with probably nothing to look forward to when they got there. Annie was a weaver by trade, but it seems to have been unusual at the time for married women to work outside the home. At four and two, Matt and his sister Flora Jane were not old enough to work, so it would have been up to Jim to feed everyone. As an ex-soldier, he would have had few skills that would get him a city job that could feed a wife and three children, so life would likely have been much harder in a Scots city than on a farm in the bush. Or maybe they were all just looking for adventure! Anyway, there they were in south-western Upper Canada. We all know what happened then, so let's have a look at the way things were and the family they left behind in Scotland. ⁽⁴⁾

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Everyone knows that Matt Coubrough was the oldest child and only son of one James Coubrough and his wife, Annie MacDonald. But did you know that Jim was also the oldest child in his family? That he was not the only son? That there were several other Matt Coubroughs? That some branches commonly spell the family name as "Cowbrough?" That those of us who are direct descendants of Matt Coubrough and Liz Brown are the only ones who pronounce the name as "Cobro" to rhyme with "hobo" or "cobra" like the snake? Everyone else says "Koo-bra," where the first syllable rhymes with "new," which is much closer to the original Cudbright, pronounced "koo-brie."

Many of our Matt's descendants grew up believing that all Coubroughs in Canada are related. ⁽⁵⁾ We all seem to have thought that Matt and Liz were the "original Coubroughs" and, thus, the ancestors of all living Canadians with that name. The fact that they raised 16 children no doubt contributed to the illusion, though it's amazing to me that Matt's parents don't seem to have been considered in the equation. I was told several times as a child that we were all descended from Matt and Liz, but not once did I hear that we were descendants fo Jim and Annie. A possible explanation is common among emigrants of all nations: Anything that happened before Saskatchewan was generally ignored. Sixty years in Ontario and centuries in Scotland were of no importance, as if they had never been. The more generations that passed, the less important the past became, until, by my time (great-great-grandchildren of Jim and Annie), all we knew was that we had come from Scotland.

It was the idea of our all being related that led me to look into the matter. It seemed to me that since no one admitted to our being Cree or Métis we must have come from somewhere else. So, knowing only that Grampa Jim and Grandma Annie had both come from Scotland--one from the Highlands, and one from the Lowlands, but not which was which--and that Grampa Jim had been a "sailor" who came from someplace called "Pelic Shaws," I set out on my great adventure: To find out who we had come from and where were the rest of us. Early on, I discovered four other branches in Canada, but it was only recently that I finally found one directly related to us: James Coubrough, born about 1750, was the great-grandfather of both our Grampa Matt and his 2^nd cousin David, who came to Montreal in 1906. James (1750) married a girl named Jean Muir in Campsie Parish, Stirlingshire, Scotland, in about 1784. Jean was from the village of Lennoxtown, and James was probably from the same place but I have not yet proven that. I found out that "Pelic Shaws" was really "Pollokshaws" and is today a suburb of Glasgow, though in Grampa Jim's time it was a small village a few miles from the city.

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Life Before Canada

I have not yet been able to discover much about where Annie came from, but judging by her last name, I suspect she was the "Highlander" in the family. From the mid-1700's, thousands of people from the highlands were forced off the land to make way for sheep who were much more profitable than crofters. ⁽⁶⁾ This was commonly known as the "highland clearances," and the people, who had to go somewhere and live somehow, moved south. Some were able to find at least seasonal work on lowland farms, but many thousands of them ended up in cities. Thousands more people were attracted to the promise of work and good wages in factories and textile mills in the cities. Increases in the Scots cloth trade eventually created many jobs for all sorts of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Annie was a weaver by trade, so she was perhaps either part of one of the families forced out of the north, or perhaps she just found the temptation of city life too strong to resist.

Grampa Jim's family, on the other hand, had moved to Eastwood Parish, near Glasgow, sometime between 1789 and 1791, so they had already been there for quite a few years before Grampa Jim was born in 1831. The Church frowned on the practice, but, according to Scots civil law, people who openly lived together as man and wife for more than one year were considered to be legally married. Thus there was no social stigma attached to the fact that Matt and Jean were not married in church until March 4, 1831, when little James was about six weeks old. The parish record does not say whether Jean had a job before she was married, but since she was already considered to be a housewife by the time of her church wedding, it would have been seen as unnecessary to mention her occupation. The parish record ⁽⁷⁾ doesn't give their ages or their parents' names, but it does say they both lived in Thornliebank when they called their banns ⁽⁸⁾ on February 14, 1831. This being a Monday, maybe Matt was a romantic sort. Marrying after the birth of a first child seems to have been a fairly common practice. At least it was done that way by an awful lot of Coubroughs over the centuries.

Young Jim, named after Matt's father, and possibly Jean's, too, was the first of 10 children who would eventually be born into this family. Jim was also the first of their descendants to come to Canada but certainly not the only one, as we will see. Matt and Jean, like many other Scots of their time, seem to have moved about somewhat over the years. None of the places they went to were more than 25 or 30 miles apart. Not very far by Canadian standards, but considering that they probably walked from one village to another, carrying small children, and with all their worldly goods in a single carrier's cart--or a wheelbarrow--moving day was not likely something they looked forward to. I have not been able to determine for certain why they moved so many times, but it likely had something to do with where he could get work. They seem to have lived in rented houses all their lives, so perhaps the rental rates also had something to do with the moves. Very few working class folks in Scotland at the time would have owned their own houses, so their situation was probably not unusual for the time and place.

Thornliebank was in the heart of the textile district. Paisley, a nearby parish in whose abbey church quite a few Coubroughs were baptised, was the location of the mills that made the beautifully designed fabrics of that name. They were much cheaper to produce for both the domestic and export markets (and were often considered finer) than the imported Indian fabrics on which the design was based. In this atmosphere, it was not at all odd that Matt, some of his brothers, quite a few cousins, and even some of his children would be employed in the cloth industry. Indeed, Matt probably got his apprenticeship as a calico printer in a place where one of his relatives worked.

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Matt Coubrough and Jean Allan

Most of what we know about Matt Coubrough and Jean Allan comes from the parish registers, which recorded marriages and baptisms, and from the census records, which, while they supply much in the way of facts, are somewhat short on details of family life. The marriage records give only the names of the bride and groom, the parish where they lived when they called the banns, and the banns date. Usually the date of the marriage is given, but not always, so our picture of the family may be quite sketchy. We do know that Matt was a calico printer, which by Matt's time meant the operator of a machine which did the actual printing, that they were married on March 4, 1831, that they moved around a lot, and that they had ten children, some of whom died in childhood.

Our Grampa Jim grew up in a big family. In a time when many people spent their whole lives in the place they were born, Matt and his family moved quite a few times, but they always lived in small, textile-factory villages. (Perhaps this gave Jim the itchy feet which landed him in Upper Canada?) Though they were in Matt's hometown for at least a couple of years after they married, probably they moved looking for work that paid better, or where they could live more cheaply as the family grew. Judging by how early all the children went to work, money was probably always scarce.

By the time of the June, 1841 census, Matt and Jean had been married ten years. They were in the 2nd house on the North Side of Burnhill Road, at the edge of enumeration district 2: County of Lanark, Parish of Rutherglen (part of), Burgh Royal and Parliamentary of Rutherglen, Enumeration District 2. Description of ditto: From James Stevens property Causewayhead along up the Shawfield Road and along North side of the Road to Burnhill to Menzie's House, including that house.

Occupying the second house on Burnhill Road, where they had probably lived at least since the summer of 1838, were:

Matthew Coubrough, male, 30, Cal Prin, not born in Lanark;

James do ⁽⁹⁾, male, 10;

Robert do, male, 8;

Jane do, female, 30, not born in Lanark county;

Jane do, female, 6;

Ann do, female, 1;

William Allan, male, 25.

This census did not record the relationship between the head of the house and other occupants, but it is much better than its predecessors which listed only names of heads of households. Everyone else was represented by a total number of males and females in the house. Also in the 1841 census, for some unknown reason, the ages of children 15 and under were approximately accurate, but the ages of adults were rounded down to the nearest five years. This is why our Matt, born in 1805, was listed as only being 30 years old when he should have been closer to 36. The William Allan listed was probably a brother of Jean, but I know nothing of her family so I can't be sure.

By 1841, Jean and Matt were the parents of six children. Baby Matthew had died of unknown causes before he was three, so there were only five living at the time of the census. Still, our Jim, the oldest, had just turned ten, so I bet it was a lively household. Great-great-great-grandma Jean had her hands full with them--and a boarder, too:

James, born Wednesday, January 26, 1831, Thornliebank, Eastwood parish, Renfrewshire;

Robert, born Tuesday, October 22, 1832, also in Thornliebank;

Jane, born Thursday, April 10, 1834, Abbey parish of Paisley, Renfrewshire;

Barbara Muir, born Wednesday, January 20, 1836, Abbey parish of Paisley;

Matthew, born September, 1838, Rutherglen, Lanark county; and

Ann, born Sunday, April 19, 1840, also in Rutherglen.

Jean and Matt were not the only Coubroughs in Rutherglen for the 1841 census. Up the road a ways were Malcolm Coubrough, Cal Prin, 50; his wife, Ann, also 50, and a boy named Malcolm Coubrough, age 10. The record doesn't say, of course, but the boy was probably either Ann and Malcolm's son or a grandson, though he may also have been an orphaned nephew. I have not yet been able to confirm this, but I think it likely that Malcolm was Matt's older brother. Born September, 1787, Matt's brother would have been about 53, which would have been rounded down to 50 by the census taker. If he was indeed Matt's brother, perhaps he was the reason they were in Rutherglen. Life is nearly always more pleasant when you have family nearby, even if you can barely keep yourselves fed.

Not all Coubroughs abandoned the home village, Thornliebank, but by 1841, the census taker found only one very small family there. Robert Coubrough, 20, Ap Cloth lapper ⁽¹⁰⁾, born Renfrew, and his wife, Margaret do, 15, born Renfrew, lodgers in the house of John Ferguson, 38, Cal Prin, and his wife Ann, 40. They lived two doors down from another family who I believe to have been Margaret's parents: Robert MacDonald, Cal Prin, 40, and Margaret do, 40. I am fairly sure that Robert and Margaret Coubrough were the Robert Coubrough and Margaret Clark MacDonald who had been married in May 1840, in Thornliebank.

Margaret's age of 15 in 1841 would seem to make her a bit on the young side to have been married for a year already, but there are two things to keep in mind here: First, the age of consent in Scotland was 14. Second, and more likely, is that she could have been 20, or even nearly 21, and still been marked as 15 with the rounding down of adult ages. Robert's given age of 20 years is probably fairly accurate, as he seems to have been born in 1820 or 1821.

Robert and Margaret were the parents of a man named John MacDonald Coubrough, born in Thornliebank, in 1846. This John eventually married a woman named Ann Inwood in England, and became the grandfather of Carolyn Elvidge (Mrs. Rod Willis) of Tallahassee, Florida. I have not yet figured out who Robert's parents were, but I suspect that they were close relatives of our Matt and Jean Coubrough.

Our line seems to be the only one that lived in Thornliebank. Most of the other big branches stayed in Stirlingshire, in the old home parishes: Stirling, Falkirk, Strathblane, Killearn, Drymen and Campsie. Quite a few families ended up in Glasgow, too, often in skilled-labour textile industry jobs, though there were railway engine drivers, shop girls, dress- and packing-crate- makers--even "spirit merchants" (sold booze, not ghosts). These places all have census records, of course, but I haven't yet read them all. For now at least, I plan to mostly follow our particular branch. There are so many Coubrough lines to follow that I will be a lot older and grayer before I track them all down, if I ever do. In the meantime, back to the present.

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Question corner

Here are some of the other things I am working on, but don't be shy. I am always happy to hear other ideas on these or any other family subject. If no one else says anything, you'll have to put up with my ramblings.

1. Having discovered at last that Annie MacDonald was not a space alien, does anyone know what part of Scotland her family came from?

2. Annie was quite a bit older than her husband, at least five and possibly as much as 11 years. How did she meet Jim Coubrough? And where? And when? Did she work in the same mill as one of his family and he met her while home on leave? Was she "a girl in a port" somewhere he was posted? Was she the sister of a fellow soldier? He was not more than 22 when they married. In fact he was still nearly three weeks shy of his 23^rd birthday when his first son was born. She was at least 28 and possibly as much as 34 when Grampa Matt was born. Was she a widow and Jim her second husband?

3. Still looking for the parents of John Couburgh of Ellrig. There is a totally unverified possibility that he might be the same man who married Jonet Buchanan in about 1703, but….

4. Also still looking for the parents of our James Coubrough who married Jean Muir. We think they were married about 1784, in Campsie parish, since their first son, yet another James, was born there in 1785, but the marriage records for that time an d place no longer exist. There is a possibility that he was about 30 years older than Jean, and that he was born in about 1732, the son of Matthew Coubrough and Jonet Morrison. It is not unheard of to have such a difference between husband and wife, but is not very common. In a time when the average life expectancy was less than 50 years, it would have been very unusual for a man to have been nearly 80 by the time his last child was born. It seems more likely that James m. Jean Muir was the grandson of Matthew and Jonet. This family seems to have been the only one with sons of the right name in the right place at the right time to have been the James who married Jean Muir. Since the marriage records no longer exist, we may never know for sure who James's parents were, but I haven't given up yet.

6. Does anyone know where Grampa Matt's sister, Barbara, lived in the US? I saw a picture of her which had a photographer's imprint from Mineapolis, Minnesota, but I don't know if she lived there or if she was just visiting. She was quite young in the picture, so it may have been taken soon after her wedding. Also, does anyone know how to spell her husband's last name? Or know what his first name was? I have seen Lafflin and Laughlin in all kinds of records, but without a first name, I have no idea which, if any, is the right one. The old picture had the name Lochland, but no luck there either.

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Other branches, and some old questions answered

Quite a few questions have appeared in these pages over the past four years and I thought some folks might be interested in knowing that I have actually found answers to a few of them. Some of the mystery people are, of course, as mysterious as ever, but since most of our ancestors were not overly concerned that we should know anything about them, we take what we can get.

1. Robert Stevenson Coubrough , who married Eliza Carpenter, was the son of William Coubrough and Janet Brown. It appears that William may have been the brother of Matthew Coubrough, who married Margaret Duncan in 1851 and moved to Australia about 1865.

2. The Matthew Coubrough who married Margaret Duncan and took her to Australia has been another of the mystery men, but I finally found his parents. In early 1851, he was still living at the home of his parents, John and Catherine Coubrough, in Barrhead, Neilston parish, Renfrew. Unfortunately, I have not yet figured out which John and Catherine they are. I had thought that John might have been the older brother of our Matt who married Jean Allan, but that John, born 1789, would have been much more than the 48 years of age given in the census.

3. We may have found the parents of Malcolm Coubrough who married Jean Buchanan in 1796. They called their first son Malcolm, so I have long though that was probably the paternal grandfather's name. I now believe the elder Malcolm to have been the son of Malcolm Coubrough and Marion Reid. The match is about 90% correct, based on information I have, but it is still too soon to proclaim him found absolutely.

4. I have mentioned several times that I encountered the names of several Coubroughs who live in South Africa but for whom I could find no larger family tree. I had about given up hope of finding anything more, when, out of the blue, this past summer, I received a letter from a man whose daughter had seen our web site and he wanted to know if they might be connected to anyone else we knew of. That letter and the one that followed answered all the "big questions."

James Coubrough, who had come to South Africa in the late 1890's or early 1900's was the man who had built the big stone house called "Stoneleigh" that I had seen on the internet, and was also the man for whom Johannesburg's Coubrough Avenue was named. As I understand, he was the owner/operator of a store for quite a few years, at least while his children grew up. It is not know what brought him to Johannesburg in the first place, but, like many another immigrant, he probably stayed because he could make a better life than he could manage in Scotland at the time.

James was the oldest son of Archibald Murdoch Coubrough and Annie Smillie. Archibald Murdoch Coubrough was also a descendant of the Malcolm Coubrough and Jean Buchanan at point 3, above.

5. In trying to record the family's past, it is just as important--and even more exciting--to find out how all the folks whose names I find made themselves a living. So you can imagine the thrill I had when yesterday I received an e-mail from the secretary of the Strathblane Heritage Society. She said that in the 1850's, the Coubroughs employed more than 500 people in their Calico Printing factory! ⁽¹¹⁾ These Strathblane Coubroughs are descendants of a branch whose first known members are John Coubrough, born 1660, and his wife, Jonat Buchanan.

6. Some time ago, I had an e-mail from a woman who had received one of the postcards I sent out at random to see if anyone was interested in the reunion idea. Her husband turned out to be a descendant of one of my many "dead-end" branches! His grandfather Malcolm was the oldest of three sons of David Coubrough and Anne Hamilton. David was not more than 41 when he died. He was born in April, 1817, but he had died and his wife had re-married by December, 1859. Anne and David's two youngest sons were both named William. The second one was born in June, 1853 so the first one, born May, 1852, must have been only a few months old at his death. This younger William married Mary Neilston Watson in 1881and moved to New Zealand.

Malcolm and William's father David (m. Anne Hamilton), was the youngest (11^th) child of Jean Buchanan and Malcolm Coubrough (point 3 of this column), married in Killearn parish, Stirlingshire, in 1796.

1. He was born before 1867. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were still separate British colonies. Back to text

2. Probably the Royal Artillery but I am not absolutely sure. I have assumed he was not an officer because no rank was given on his son Matt's baptism certificate. Back to text

3. Daughter Mary Ann was born within a few weeks of their arrival in Ontario so Annie was likely very pregnant when they moved. Back to text

4. MacDonald is a popular name, and what little I know of ours has been published here. Coubrough is more rare so I found more about them. Back to text

5. We probably are, but not as closely as we thought. The name is quite rare and all living bearers seem to have originated in the same place. This premise is the basis for much of my research on the family. Back to text

6. Crofters were small tenant farmers who sometimes held only enough land for a very small house and garden. They usually had a claim of kinship with the laird (clan chief) that entitled them to his support. Sheep had no such claims. Back to text

7. See the January 1999 edition for copies of the parish records. Back to text

8. Banns were a public announcement that a couple meant to wed. They were supposed to be called on 3 successive Sundays, to allow for objections to the match, but they were sometimes hurried along by calling all three on the same day. Back to text

9. "Do" meant "ditto." Back to text

10. Apprentice cloth lapper; i.e., cloth finisher in a textile mill. Back to text

11. I don't think our Matt was one of them as I never found any record of him living in Strathblane. Back to text