| Vol. 9 No. 2 |
July 2005 |
| The Coubrough Times | |
| The Canadian Years | |
Stirling 2005
| Stirling 2005 | James C & Jean Muir | Annie: Alien forever? | Jim C & Annie Macdonald |
| John C & Catherine Andrew | Other branches | Question Corner | Editor's Corner |
Stirling 2005
Happy Fall Everyone! There is big news in the family shrub this summer.
The third Coubrough International Family reunion was another huge success. On Monday, August 8, 2005, about 40 people got together at the Lesser Albert Hall in Stirling, Stirling, Scotland. Some were old friends who have been to all the reunions, and some were new cousins we hadn’t met before. We were about 45 people, all told, but several only came for one day, and some for only a few hours. With only a half-dozen local Scots in attendance, nearly everyone was from somewhere else. The largest group was probably Canadian, though with about 10, the English ran a close second. We were also four from the US, three from New Zealand and one from Australia. The New Zealanders and our lone Aussie were all in Scotland, either working or visiting family, for some time before the reunion; no one came from that far away especially for the party. Once again, three of the four big branches were represented.
The party itself went very well. Jim Coubrough, his wife, Angela, and his sister, Juliet McCaffery, kept us well-fed and well-entertained. Everything went off without a hitch, including several side trips. On the first afternoon, we went to a building called Cowane's hospital (in Stirling), which was built in 1639, or thereabouts, and was originally meant to be a hospice for poor men. In the 19th century, the hospital's trustees turned it into a guild-hall for themselves, and the poor men were out of luck. In those days, the wealthy local merchants ran the city, with the dean of guild acting in the capacity of (unelected) mayor. In 1855, one James Cowbrough, son of Henry Cowbrough and Mary Wood, was the Dean of Guild, and was the de facto mayor of Stirling. His portrait in Cowane’s hospital was the objective of our visit.
For the second day, Jim arranged for two local historians to meet us in Strathblane, home of more than two centuries’ worth of Coubroughs. The ladies gave us a nice little tour of the village, including a hairdresser's shop which was once the Coubrough company store. In the manner of such establishments everywhere, the printworkers bought goods on credit. The weekly total would be deducted from the workers’ wages before they were paid. There was no word as to whether the Coubroughs followed the then-common practice of inflating the prices so that the workers were virtually bondsmen. There is no reason to suppose the Coubroughs were better or worse than their peers, but they do seem to have been among the more benevolent owners, so perhaps they ran a straight operation with fair prices. Other highlights of the tour were the Free Church building, now a private home, where the calico Coubroughs once worshiped, and, in the local primary school, the plaque placed by Anthony Park Coubrough's sons in his honour. A.P had been the chairman of the local school board at the time of his death in 1883.
The Strathblane churchyard holds a number of tombstones marking the last resting place of the families of Malcolm Coubrough and Jean Buchanan, their sons Malcolm and James, and the elder Malcolm’s brother, John. Nearby is the huge red granite monument to Anthony Park Coubrough’s family. There are several others at the other end of the churchyard.(1)
On the same day, we stopped by the Campsie cemetery, in Clachan of Campsie. The cemetery is well-kept, but it is very old, and no longer in use. The outer wall has a date of 1627, but there is also a crypt dated 1606. Most of the stones are sandstone or marble, both of which, besides being much easier to carve than, say, granite, were also available locally. Unfortunately, both weather very badly, and most of the inscriptions are completely obliterated. The only legible Coubrough stone was one erected by Jane Coubrough (daughter of Malcolm Coubrough & Catherine McFarlan), in memory of her husband, John Shanks.
The parish church is a ruin. The walls are mostly still standing, but the roof has been gone for a long time and there are trees growing inside the walls. As for the rest of the village, there is a small teashop near the cemetery and a few homes, but nothing like what it must have been when Coubroughs lived there.
Mornings were mainly spent at the Albert Hall, visiting and studying the books, pictures, family trees, and other items that party-goers had brought along. The most unusual item was a tiny tape measure advertising EYO Whisky and Cowbrough’s Nourishing Ale, generously donated by Louise McQueen.
Among the interesting documents were Anne Cruickshank’s accounts(2) of the psychiatric assessment, and subsequent trial, of William Cowbrough, for the attempted murder of his wife, Jane Bryson. William, a printer by trade, was the youngest son of William Coubrough, surgeon, and Margaret Aitken.
He and Jane had been married in 1859, and lived in Falkirk for a couple of years. William seems to have been unstable from the start and the marriage was not a happy one. At the trial, a lawyer was to say of William, “From his childhood upwards there was no doubt that he was of weak intellect. He was weak not only in mind, but in body.” William always felt his wife was gossiping behind his back and alienating him from his business contacts. He also seemed to think she was unfaithful to him. William and Jane had moved often, including several years spent in either New Zealand or Australia.(3)
Jane returned to Falkirk in about 1873 or 74 with her girls Jessie and Margaret, both born in Scotland, her sons William (1869) and John Archibald (1871) and her baby, Emma Jane, who was born at sea on the way home!
William appears not to have returned to Scotland until about 1877, when he bought himself a printing and bookselling shop in Glasgow. He sold it only a couple of years later. It was around this time, about 1878 or 79, that he was fined 30 shillings or 30 days for assaulting his wife. He seems to have travelled frequently from Glasgow to Falkirk, to visit his sister, Ellen(4) . He was very upset when she died in 1894. He had bought himself a ticket to go to “America,” but changed his mind. For reasons known only to himself, he also bought himself a gun.
Jane had been unsuccessfully trying to get arrears of aliment from him, especially after he said his sister left him money. (Ellen’s will showed she and her sister Margaret had left everything to one another. Did Margaret give William some of the £380 Ellen had left?) He offered to give his daughters £200 to set up a milliner’s business. Jane travelled to his lodgings in Glasgow to demand settlement. The landlady later said she hadn’t even known he was married! She also reported that William seemed to get into a ‘frenzy when he thought of her [Jane] and had threatened to shoot her.’
Jane and her family in Falkirk had not seen William for some time when, on June 10, 1895, around 11 AM, he suddenly appeared at the house in 46 High Street. Jane rand a “servants’ agency” and her girls did dressmaking from their home. Jane was dealing with clients, when he entered the parlour and began talking about a settlement. He wanted Jane to go to Glasgow to sort things out. Their daughter Emma remained with her mother as Jane was, understandably, a little afraid of her husband. From under the coat he carried folded over his arm, he produced his pistol and fired twice at Jane, wounding her on the chest and back. He turned on Emma, but there were other people in the house, and at the sound of the shots, they rushed in to help and called the police.
Meanwhile, William put his gun in his mouth and shot himself. He dramatically laid down as though dead and imagined he and Jane would ‘appear together before a judge with whom perjury was impossible’. When the police arrived, he and Jane were both taken to the Cottage Hospital. They both recovered and Jane went home. Held in Glasgow Prison until the trial, William was assessed to see if he was insane.
His special defence pleaded in court in Glasgow on 29 Aug 1895 was that he was insane at the time of the attack. He was found guilty, but court reduced his sentence from hanging to eight years’ hard labour at Peterhead Prison, in Aberdeen, where we found him in the 1901 census.
Daughter Emma married George Clark, a commercial traveller living at 27 Alma Street, Falkirk, in 1898. There were no known children.
Emma’s sister, Helen Dawson C., married Frederick Ninian Hunt, a draper from Crieff, on April 2, 1905, in Falkirk. They had four children, but I don’t know their names.
William died September 8, 1915, in Larbert Assylum, of arteriosclerosis. He was 81. We don’t know how much contact William had with his family during or after his prison term, but when he died of arteriosclerosis, on September 8, 1915, aged 81, in Larbert Assylum, it was his daugter Emma who reported his death.
Jane Bryson evidently went to live with her youngest daughter, Emma. When Jane, aged 83, died November 21, 1923, it was in Crieff, Perth, probably at Emma’s.
Another of Anne’s interesting booklets dealt with the failure of the Falkirk Union Bank. William Coubrough, one of the bank’s principals, lost everything he owned in the collapse. I have known about William for quite a while, but I didn’t know which one he was. After much effort, and no little expense, Anne figured out who his family was, and told us all about his involvement with the bank.
William, second son of John Coubrough and his wife, Jean Cowbrough,(5) seems to have been a bit of a maverick. He and his partners had been warned that, since they had insufficient capital and knew nothing of banking, the ventur would almost certainly fail. They paid no attention to the naysayers—it couldn’t happen to them, after all. But it did.
In those days (1850s), anyone who set up a bank was personally liable for all its assets. Inventories made by the bank’s creditors show that William lost everything, including his Ellrig estate, and all personal property. For a man who had inherited land from his father and been able to buy more, it must have come as a shock to realise he owned nothing more than the clothes he stood up in. His sister Jean had managed to claim a few of the family’s heirlooms as her own, but when the creditors were done, it was a pitifully small hoard.
William’s only known family was a son by Margaret Riddell, to whom he was not legally married. The son, another William grew up to marry Agnes Turnbull and raise a large family of his own in Selkirk. Agnes Turnbull’s younger daughter, Eliza Jane, moved to Ontario before 1881. She was married to a James Bertram, in Ottawa, on October 28th of that year.
William the printer and William the banker were both of the Ellrig line.
For the third day of the reunion, Jim arranged a road trip which included both Ellrig and Falkirk. Being mainly of interest to those of that line, not everyone went. The supper and ceilidh on the Wednesday evening went well. The Ceilidh band gave lessons in the country dances that went with the music, and everyone had a great time. Unfortunately, we were just getting warmed up by the time we had to be out of the hall at 11 PM. Amid hugs and promises to meet again in Detroit, in 2007, we said our hurried goodbyes. Then, just like Christmas, the long-awaited third international reunion was all just a great memory.
The 10-year gap between James Coubrough and Jean Muir’s sons Robert, b 1795, and Matt, b 1805, is as much a mystery as ever. Some new theories have been advanced, with as yet no proof forthcoming for any of them. There is, though, some news of their second son, Malcolm, and his family.
For quite some time, I had thought that Malcolm and Agnes McKinnon had only two sons, James and Robert, born 12 years apart. Two more children, Barbara and Malcolm, came to light when I realised that Agnes McKinnon and Ann McKinnon were the same person. Then I found that Margaret, wife of John Bennett, shepherd, was also Ann and Malcolm’s daughter, bringing the total to five.
Ages ago, I had found the family of Ann Coubrough and Andrew Hamilton, coal miner, but again, I didn’t know where she belonged. Ann and Andrew were married in Barony parish, Lanark, on June 24, 1838. They had at least five children: Malcolm, William, Mary, Robert, and Elizabeth. That was all I knew about them. With their second son being called William and the first daughter being called Mary, I had thought that those might be the names of Ann’s parents. I couldn’t find any such couple, so Ann spent a few years on the alien list.
She couldn’t hide forever, though, and this past summer I just had to visit Edinburgh’s register office while I was in Scotland. There she was: Ann Coubrough, daughter of of Malcolm Coubrough, calico printer, and Ann McKinnon, and widow of Andrew Hamilton, coal miner, had died February 3, 1899, aged 89.
Malcolm Coubrough and Ann McKinnon were no less a puzzle than their children. You will recall that I found a “Mrs. Coubrough” and her 29-year-old daughter Barbara in one of the old census records. I eventually worked out that they must have been Ann McKinnon and her girl Barbara, (who later married Alexander McHutcheson), but that was as far as I got. Then I found Ann’s death certificate and I went back to look at them all again.
Ann and Malcolm don’t seem to have named any of their children after her parents. Possibly she was not close to them, or knew them only as names. Given her era’s short life expectancy and high mortality rate, she would have been neither the first infant to lose both parents, nor the first woman to name her children after the people who raised her. Or maybe they just didn’t follow the usual naming patterns. By no means all families named the first son after his paternal grandfather, the first daughter after her maternal grandmother, etc. This was especially true where one partner was not a native Scot, and we have no idea where Ann was born. Alexander McKinnon sounds like a good Scots name, but Frances is not. We don’t know if Ann had any brothers or sisters, nor whether the family may have been English or Irish—or both.
Presumably, their first son, James, was called after Malcolm’s father, but the second known daughter was Margaret, not Jean. The first daughter was Ann, but the second known son was Robert, not Alexander. If Malcolm and Ann were members of a Free Church or other breakaway congregation, there may be no records available. Malcolm was baptised in the Church of Scotland (Campsie parish register), but none of his children were. We have found out who their parents were only from death certificates of those who died after 1855. Ann’s first two children were probably less than a year apart and may have been twins. The two youngest children were also only a year or so apart. Then there were only two children (Margaret, 1815, and Robert, 1821) between young Ann in 1810, and Barbara in 1829. Spaces of 5, 6, and 8 years could certainly have held other children who died young, though not necessarily in childhood. In the first half of the 19th century, many people expired well before their 40th birthdays. Since few or no deaths were recorded before civil registration began in 1855, there would be no record of a non-Church of Scotland person born in, say, 1812, who died at the age of 40. It is entirely possible that our “missing” Alexander, Jean and Frances were married and had families of their own, but were not recorded for posterity.
And there is the distinct possibility that Ann McKinnon “married up” the social scale. I am not sure exactly what a “nailer” did for a living, but very poor people could sometimes make enough to keep from starving by hand-making nails. In the 1790s, when Ann was a child, nails were expensive to buy, but the people who made them might not sell them directly to a consumer. A merchant would have bought them as cheaply as possible from several different makers and sold them at profit. The nail-maker’s family would not live large from selling them. We can’t say for sure, of course, but Ann might have been a printworker, too, and perhaps very pretty. The Coubroughs, being tradesmen, would have had some standing in the community. As a calico printer, Malcolm would have been drawing a fairly good salary. Being near the top of the printworker hierarchy, he would not normally have looked for a wife among people who were so poor as to have to make nails for a living. If she was a factory worker, though, and beautiful with it, she would have been fair game. Even the lowest of the factory jobs paid more than a nail-maker earned, so Ann might have been more affluent than her parents. If so, maybe the reason Ann didn’t name any children after her parents was that she and Malcolm were of sufficiently exalted status that they felt no need to acknowledge her family. Unless we go back and ask, though, we’ll likely never know.
Married in 1807, Malcolm and Ann had obviously both been born well before 1800. They seem to have lived at Rutherglen for many years, and their son Robert is buried there. The Rutherglen burying ground is very old (6), and very peaceful, despite the fact that it is now smack in the middle of a Glasgow suburb. Unfortunately, none of the few legible stones bears a name recognisable as Coubrough.
Malcolm was said to be deceased when their son Robert died in August 1855, but Ann, Malcolm, and their 10-year-old youngest son were all in the 1851 Rutherglen census. Presuming Ann’s husband was still alive at that time, he must have been at least 63 or 64 when he gave up the ghost. Or he could have been as much as 68, if he died only a short time before Robert. Since most places in Scotland didn’t keep registers of deaths before 1855, and in the absence of a tombstone, there is probably no way to find an exact date now. We will have to settle for “between June 1851 and August 1855.”
His wife was made of sturdier stuff, but otherwise, we know very little about her. The daughter of Frances Thomson and Alexander McKinnon, nailer, she was about 19 when she married Malcolm Coubrough. They had at least six children, and she probably went by “Ann,” rather than Agnes, but that’s about it. The marriage register and the death certificates of her two oldest sons call her Agnes, but the death certificates for her other four children all give her name as Ann.
As mentioned, Ann and Malcolm were in Rutherglen in the early summer of 1851. Matt and Jean Allan lived there at the same time, but Ann and Malcolm stayed there, not moving back to Thornliebank, as Matt did. Being nearly 20 years older than Matt, Malcolm may have retired in Rutherglen, though it was unusual for even highly-skilled factory workers to have enough money to quit working much before they died. Malcolm would likely have been senior to his brother at work, too, so if the factory laid people off, the more junior workers might have gone first. Then again, perhaps Malcolm just wasn’t as restless as Matt. After all, Malcolm still had his wife, while Matt probably lost his within the year after the census. At any rate, in 1862, Agnes lived at 37 Chapel Street, Rutherglen. She had most likely been in poor health for some time, and had perhaps never been strong. Her cause of death, reported by her youngest son, Malcolm, was recorded as “General Debility For Years.” She was about 74 when she died at home, just after tea-time, (5:35pm), on September 16, 1862.
I told you last time that I had begun searching for Annie Macdonald’s family in the parish of North Uist(7), Scotland. I wrote to a professional genealogist, Bill Lawson, who specialises in that area, but his answer, when it finally came, was not encouraging. Our Macdonalds were Free Church people, rather than Church of Scotland. At the time we are looking at, there was no permanent minister in the parish, and so, no records. It seems the only church records for the place and time are Catholic, and even they are spotty at best. It was generally written down somewhere when a croft changed hands, such as when a oldest son inherited from his father. These records, however, make no mention of younger sons who might have worked on the farm, or who might have moved away. The crofts were usually so small as to be able to only support one family, so only the elder son could live there, and even he had to wait until his father died. Mr. Lawson did find a couple called Neil and Flora McDonald, but they were at least a generation younger than the people we’re looking for, and almost certainly not ours. Even if our Neil was not a younger son, the chance of finding anything about him on his native isle is about zero.
Mr. Lawson thought our chances of finding anything useful on this side of the Atlantic were equally bleak. If they came on one of the settlement schemes that were rife at the time, they may not have owned the land they settled on at Gabarus. It was common for wealthy or high-born people to be granted a large chunk of Canada on the condition that they find and provide for enough emigrants to fill it. The tenants were exactly that: tenants. As in the “old country,” they held no title to the land they worked. This is perhaps the reason why the whole family packed up and set off for Ontario in the early 1850s, nearly 20 years after they had left Scotland. Unless they really had itchy feet, it might have meant that they finally had money and opportunity to buy their own land. However they got to Cape Breton, and whatever the reason they left, it may be just as hopeless trying to find them in Canada as it was in Scotland.
Or it may not. We have been in contact with a descendant of Annie’s sister Flora, who, you will recall, married a Norman McLean. She stayed in Cape Breton when the rest of the family moved west. This man says he has a lot of information on the early days of the family, and has promised to share it. And I haven’t given up the Scotland angle. We believe Neil and Flora’s children were all born on North Uist, but other nearby islands also had lots of McDonalds and McLeans, who I hope to investigate eventually. Who knows who will turn up?
Where/when Grampa Jim and Grandma Annie were marrried and whether Grampa Matt was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, or St. John, New Brunswick, are topics we have discussed more than once in these pages. We have long since found that Jim and Annie were married on September 21, 1851, at St. Andrews Church, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The question of Grampa Matt’s birth place is still open, but a new angle has recently come to light. In the beginning, no one now breathing seemed to know when or where Jim and Annie were married. Most seemed to think it must have been before they left Scotland, an idea lent credence by the story that Annie was practically in labour by the time she landed in Halifax. I have heard from several people that Jim and Annie landed at Halifax "just barely in time" for Grampa Matt to have been born (8 Jan 1854). Knowing they were married in 1851, and that Matt had been baptised in St. John, N.B., led me to wonder if they might not have been returning to Halifax, rather than arriving for the first time. Maybe the story was true, but the name of the child involved had "migrated" over the years? Matt's sister Flora Jane was definitely born in Halifax, in February 1856. Her father got out of the army and worked as a guard at the North West Arm prison, in 1856-57. Probably Jim and Annie did get to Halifax "just in time," but was the baby Flora, rather than Matt?
A while back, I reported that I had found the marriage certificate of William Coubrough, age 38, and Jeanie Deuchar(8), 37. His parents were Matt Coubrough & Jean Allan; hers were William Deuchar & Jean Coubrough. Obviously, young William had married his cousin, but which one? The answer has been revealed.
According to her 1878 death certificate, William Deuchar’s wife, age 67, was the daughter of Catherine Andrew! I have long thought that Catherine Andrew’s daughter Jean, b 1810, was the wife of Joseph Gibb. I also thought that the reason they had only one child (who later married Jane Martin) was that Jean had died young. It never occurred to me that her husband might have been the one to move on.
Based on this new finding, it has also occurred to me that we could have the wrong Jean Coubrough married to Joseph Gibb. Jane Martin’s husband was born in 1829, in Ratho(9), Mid-Lothian. Catherine Andrew’s daughter married William Deuchar in Barony parish, Lanark, in 1836. If the wives of Joseph Gibb and William Deuchar were indeed the same woman, there are several possibilities. Joseph Sr. might have died soon after his son was born, or he and Jean might have been estranged for some time. More likely, Joseph Jr., was the product of a handfast marriage, where his parents pledged themselves to “a year and a day,” simply moving on with their lives if they found themselves incompatible. The boy would probably have gone with his mother, but he could just as easily have gone with his father. This theory is supported by two facts: There is so far no record of any marriage of Jean Coubrough and Joseph Gibb, in Ratho or anyplace else, and the record of her death (reported by husband, William D) makes no mention of her having been anyone’s widow, nor of her having had any surnames but Coubrough and Deuchar. Both notations were standard practice in the case of widows who remarried. Further, the death of Jane Martin’s husband was reported by Matthew Gibb Coubrough, who said that he was Joseph’s “cousin germain.” The only way Matthew could have been Joseph’s cousin was if their parents had been related, so it seems that Catherine Andrew’s daughter was in fact the wife of both Joseph Gibb and William Deuchar.
We have for some time been puzzled by the fact that John Coubrough and Catherine Andrew seemed to have no sons named John. It turns out that they did, and he was there all the time—we just didn’t see him.
We have known for ages that John Coubrough and Mary McIntyre were married in Glasgow, in 1838, but we had no idea whose he was. They had at least three children: Catherine, b 1841; John, b abt 1850; and Mary, b 1851. The space between Catherine and John is certainly large enough to have held other children, but we haven’t yet found them, nor do we yet know what became of the girls Catherine and Mary. Mary and John were both recorded in the 1851 census, but when their 10-year-old son John died of enteritis in 1860, the boy’s parents were both deceased. Neither had seen their 40th birthday. Beyond his being an orphan, the record of young John’s tragic death held another surprise: the informant was William Deuchar, Uncle. Other than William and his daughter, there are no records of any Deuchars marrying any Coubroughs, so the only way William could have been young John’s uncle was if William’s Coubrough wife was the boy’s aunt. The boy was a Coubrough, so it must have been his father who was Jean’s relation. It seems obvious that Jean and her brother would have had the same parents, so if Jean’s mother was Catherine Andrew, Jean’s brother must have been Catherine’s son.
John Coubrough and Catherine Andrew had ten children that we know of, with recent discoveries filling some of the odd gaps we previously had in the list. Beyond the first two, we don’t know exactly when all the kids were born. The Eastwood parish register records the baptisms of John and Catherine’s son John, b 1808, and their daughter, Jean, b 1810. After that, all we have are guesses. The ages we have found in various documents are so confusing that they cannot possibly all be right. A more likely answer is that most of the children, not being particularly well-educated, simply didn’t know exactly how old they were at any given time. The Eastwood parish clerk seems to have been a very conscientious sort, recording both birth and baptism dates, but John and Catherine seem to have moved around quite a bit, and perhaps not all clerks were as dedicated as the Eastwood incumbent.
Perhaps most parents tried to keep their children at home as long as they could, but in John and Catherine’s day, children were genrally considered to be of working age as early as six or eight, and almost certainly by the age of ten. In 1818, when Catherine Andrew’s oldest son would have been 10 years old, the law specified neither the minimum age for entry into the workforce, nor the maximum number of hours children could work. In the factories, children as young as five and six were expected to work the same 14 – 16 hour days as their parents, for only a few pennies a day, or even as a family unit with the father’s wages including not only his own labour but that of his wife or child as well.
Catherine Andrew’s husband John had started his working life as a weaver, probably working independantly at his own loom and selling his own work. Hand-loom weavers generally worked at home, at their own pace. They could have lunch with their families, or take an afternoon off. Eventually, though, the water- or steam-opeated power-looms forced hand-loom weavers like John out of business. Power-looms could produce much more cloth much faster than hand-looms, and weavers, John among them, had to either find a factory job or starve. Choosing the former, John found work as a power-loom tenter. While it might have kept them from starvation, it was a job not nearly as lucrative as being the independant businessman he had been. In some families, it was a matter of pride to have as many children working as possible, for John and Catherine, the money the children earned was probably the difference between subsistence and destitution. Thus, while all of John and Catherine’s children officially attended school, they also all worked in the calico factory from a young age. School attendance was probably not high on their list of priorities, and if they did go, they were likely too tired to actually learn anything.
In the 1830s, child labour laws were created, eventually reducing a child’s workday to “as little as eight hours hours,” and specifying the minimum age for employment as ten years. Mandatory school attendance was also legislated, with varying degrees of success. Factory schools, where the children were supposed to work mornings and go to school in the afternoons, or work three days and go to school for two, were one option, but the laws had no teeth and many people, including parents who needed their child’s income, ignored them completely. Well-intentioned as they were, the laws were too late for John and Catherine’s children. They had already grown up with no education, or at least already working, by the time the laws were enacted.
Because John and Catherine’s children were all born, and married before compulsory civil registration began in 1855, most of our birth dates are based on the ages in their death certificates. Even if they did know how old they were, the subject of the record was not the one giving the information, and we have no guarantee that their families knew when they were born. (Even today, I know people who have no idea of their parents’ true age.) We have also found ages in census records. While these are notoriously inaccurate, where they match the age at death, there is a reasonable chance that they are correct. Even so, at this long remove, we are left with estimates and guesses, and still only an approximate birth order for John and Catherine’s ten children: James, 1808; Jean, 1810; Robert, 1820; John, 1822; William, 1822; Matthew, 1823; Catherine, 1824; Barbara, 1829; Andrew, 1831; and Malcolm, 1834. John and William were likely born the same year; whether they were twins we don’t know.
Of the 10 children:
1. In the 1841 census, a James Coubrough lived in the home of John Coubrough and Catherine Andrew. Said to be 25 years old, we don’t know if he was the boy b 1808, with the wrong age, or if he was a completely different person, born about 1816. We have so far found nothing else about James.
2. Jean was the wife (churched or otherwise) of first Joseph Gibb, and then of William Deuchar. She appears to have had one child by each man.
3. Robert married first Margaret Clark MacDonald, then Mary Sandilands. He had four children by Margaret and three by Mary. Of the second family, only the middle child, David, grew up.
4. John married Mary McIntyre. They had three children that we know of, and both died before they were 40. At least one of their children (John, mentioned above) went to live with Jean & William Deuchar, but what happened to the other children is unknown.
5. William married Jane Brown and had six children, including a set of twins. Possibly William and his brother John were twins, with no proof either way. Since he had his father’s name, indicating that he was the third son, I have assumed that John was older than William, but it may not have been so.
6. Mathew married Margaret Duncan. They had seven eight children, and moved to Australia in about 1856 or 57.
7. Catherine married Samuel McCready. The McCreadys were very generous people. They had 12 children of their own, plus they at least partly raised her sister Barbara’s daughter, Catherine Aitkenhead. In the 1871 census, Mrs. McCready’s mother, their niece Catherine A, and the neice’s illegitimate infant daughter all lived in the McCready home!
8. Barbara married David Aitkenhead and had two children. Barbara apparently died quite young, probably before 1855. What became of her husband and son is not known, but her daughter Catherine was taken in by Barbara’s next older sister, Catherine McCready. Catherine Aitkenhead was about 18 when her older daughter, Catherine Harrison, was born in 1870. Miss A also had a daughter named Barbara, born 1874, but she didn’t marry the child’s father, James Cochrane, until 1881. Catherine Aitkenhead’s marriage didn’t last long. She was a widow, aged 41, when she died of tuberculosis in November 1891.
9. Andrew was 10 years old in the 1841 census, but that is so far the only think we know about him.
10. Malcolm married Mary Cameron and had nine children.
1. On December 11, 1835, in the Barony parish of Lanark shire, Jean Coubrough married David McAuslan. They had one daughter, Janet, christened May 1, 1836, also in Barony. In the spring of 1841, the census taker for Campsie parish found 5-year-old Janet McAuslan living in the home of one Robert Coubrough, age 75. Also in the house were Malcolm Coubrough, 30, hand-loom weaver (cotton), Jane Coubrough, 35, and Elizabeth Coubrough, 25. The 1841 census rounded the ages of adults down to the nearest five years and didn’t list family relationships, but this had to be the family of Robert Coubrough and Jane/Janet Muir. No one old enough to be Robert’s wife was listed, so he was likely widowed by then.
Even though I found this family in the census at least five or six years ago, they were on the alien list until just recently. Early in the summer just past, I got a copy of the death certificate for Jane McAuslan, 79, widow of David, and daughter of Robert Coubrough, letter carrier, and Jean Muir.
The “letter carrier” sounded familiar, and when I checked, I realised that the fathers of John Coubrough (m. Mary McVean), and of Elizabeth Coubrough (m. Alexander Kerr) were both letter carriers named Robert. A few minutes’ search had taken David McAuslan’s wife from being an orphan to having a whole family back.
Jane must have been very dedicated to her husband. Even though she was not more than 35 when she lost him, she had not remarried by the time she died in 1884, at the age of 79. Jane’s death was reported by her grandson, James Brown.
Jane’s daughter Janet was 20 years old when she married George Brown in Glasgow, on July 21, 1856. George and Jane had four children, all born in Glasgow: Jane Coubrough, 1857; James, 1862; George, 1866; and Janet, 1868. There were possibly more children than James in the space between Jane and George, but we don’t know who, or if. Janet McAuslan died at the age of 47, a few months before her mother.
2. David McAuslan’s wife has her family back, but we can’t quite say the same for her father. He was alive for the 1841 census, of course, but we know nothing of him before or after. If the census age was anywhere near accurate, he would have been born about 1760 – 1767. Malcolm Coubrough and Marrion Reid had a son named Robert christened in Campsie in May of 1762. He would have been 79 in 1841, which would have rounded down to 75. The census Robert appears to have had a son named Malcolm, which would fit with the name of Marrion Reid’s husband. If Mrs. McAuslan’s father was really Marrion Reid’s son, he was most likely also the brother of Malcolm who married Jean Buchanan. (See below.)
3. Jean Buchanan’s husband may have been the son of Marrion Reid. In the Strathblane cemetery, I found several stones with the Coubrough name. The huge red granite monument to calico Anthony Park Coubrough’s family, at the very edge of the churchyard, is the most obvious. At the other end of the churchyard is a stone for Anthony P’s granddaughter, Mary Hannah Butler Coubrough, and her husband, the Reverend Theodor Johnson.
A few metres to the left of the red granite rock is a group of three tombstones. The upright one, at the right of the group, is of grey concrete. Originally placed by James Coubrough(10) in memory of his wife, Margaret Murdoch, James and his 2nd wife, Margaret Smith, are also buried there.
The other two stones in the group, both lying flat(11) on the ground, are of red sandstone. One is directly in front of the upright stone; the other is immediately to its left. The one on the left was placed by Malcolm Coubrough, Farmer in Auchindeen, in memory of his wife, Jean Buchanan. Their son Malcolm, his daughter, Ann, and her husband, John McPherson, are all buried there. The last rest of the man who laid the stone is not known.
It is the inscription on the second flat stone that makes me think Jean Buchanan’s husband was the son of Marrion Reid, and possibly the brother of Mrs. David McAuslan’s father. The stone is partly below the sod, and is so badly weathered that the cursive script is worn nearly smooth in spots, but with a little concentration, I was able to make it out:
Erected by Malcolm and Jane Coubrough in Strathblane in memory of their brother John who departed this life October 16th, 1771, in the 26th year of his age.
I could be mistaken, of course, but the only John Coubrough I know of who would have been even close to 25 in 1771, was Marrion Reid’s son, christened in March 1747. It is unclear whether the phrase “their brother” was used to indicate that John was the brother of both Malcolm and Jean, or whether he was Malcolm’s brother and Jean’s brother-in-law. Either way, Marrion Reid’s family fits the bill. This inscription, and its proximity to stones known to belong to Jean Buchanan’s family, seems to me to be pretty strong, if circumstantial, evidence of some relationship between Marrion Reid’s husband and Jean Buchanan’s husband.
Though there are no longer any Coubrough stones visible between these three stones and the granite monument, I have a hunch they may be the two ends of a whole line of Coubrough graves. Many of the old markers bore only the initials of the plot’s owner, and, sometimes, a year. The large granite monument, with its birth and death dates, wives’ names, etc., is of fairly recent date (likely not much before 1900). It almost certainly replaces a number of earlier markers, all of which are either gone completely or buried under the sod. Again, the proximity of the granite monument to the group of three stones, I think, represents a link between Jonet Buchanan’s family and Jean’s, but whether that connection is through the Coubroughs or through the Buchanans, is hard to say.
3. We have known for years that an Ann Coubrough married a John McPherson on November 9, 1850, in New Kilpatrick parish, Dumbarton, and that they at least 8 kids. As usual, she was on the alien list. Then I got my hands on Ann’s death certificate, where I found her parents: Malcolm Coubrough and Isobel Logan. Isobel and Malcolm, Jean Buchanan’s eldest son, were not legally married, and Ann seems to have been their only child. Ann died in 1924. She is buried with her grandmother, father and husband under the left-most stone of the group of three.
4. Also in the Strathblane churchyard is the family of John Coubrough and Jessie Walker McIndoe. John’s parents were James Coubrough and his second wife, Margaret Smith, who are under the upright stone discussed above. John and Jessie’s simple concrete cross is at the other end of the churchyard, a few metres from Mary Hannah and Theordor Johnson. The same cross also commemorates their son Robert, who fell in France in the First World War, and John’s sisters, Janet, Jemima, and Marion.
5. A while back, I had an e-mail from a woman whose ancestor was one William Shanks. His parents, John Shanks and Jane Coubrough, had been married in Barony parish, Lanark, on May 29, 1836, and had five known children: James, 1837; William, 1844; Robert, 1846; and Walter, 1849. Two years later, we have found out that this Jane was an Ellrig, but still know little else about her life, except that it ended in 1890.
Jane, born February 3, 1808, was the first of Catherine McFarlane & Malcolm Coubrough’s 10 kids. She was followed by: Margaret, in 1810; William, 1812; Catherine, 1815; Ann, 1817; Malcolm, 1820; Agnes, 1823; Christina, 1825; Helen, 1828; and Joan, abt 1836. We know at least the names of the families of all but Catherine and Malcolm, who probably died quite young, possibly in childhood.
Of the others:
Margaret married James McNicol in 1838. They had seven children, and Margaret died in 1910, at 95.
William married Bethia McMillan in 1867. They had three sons. Malcolm, the eldest, was 21 when he died of tuberculosis in 1863. Daniel and William both married and had large families, of whom several emigrated to the US. William died in 1877, aged 64.
Annie married Francis Holt in 1849. They had one daughter, Annie.
Agnes married Andrew Stephen in 1866; it is not known if they had any children. Agnes was about 50 when she died in 1874.
Christina Wardrop McFarlane married Alexander Patrick, Cotton Spinner, in 1844. They had three children. Christina was 69 at her death in the Barnhill Poorhouse, in Glasgow, in 1902.
Helen was about 30, and probably not married, when she died in Glasgow in 1858.
Joan was 17 or 18 when she and George Humphrey married in 1853. They had six children before George died in 1866. Two years later, she married Walter Douglas and they had two more children.
Catherine McFarlane’s husband Malcolm was born in 1787, fourth of Margaret Gourley and William Coubrough’s seven children. Margaret Gourley’s husband was, of course, the only known child of William Coubrough and Agnes Wright. We believe Agnes’s William to have been the youngest son of Mary Moir and William Coubrough, eldest surviving son of John & Helen Stevenson of Ellrig.
6. The 1881 census for the Menteith district of Scotland lists an Alexander Coubrough, 41, who was the farmer of 350 acres. The only other occupant of the house was his niece, Annie Coubrough, age 28. Obviously, Annie was the daughter of one of Alexander’s siblings, but with only the census to go on, it was impossible to say which one. Annie languised on the endless alien list for years.
Then, in 1895, an Ann Coubrough married a John McLaren in the Blythswood district of Glasgow. She said her mother’s name as Annie Coubrough, but gave no father’s name. Alone, this certainly would not have solved the mystery, but the bride also said her home address was Malling Farm, Port of Menteith. There was only one family she could have belonged to: that of John Coubrough & Mary Graham.
In about 1853, their oldest child, Annie, gave birth to a daughter she named after herself. Sadly, Mary Graham’s daughter didn’t live to see her baby girl grow up. She was only 24 years old when she died of “heart disease and dropsy” in 1856. There is a monument to her in the Drymen churchyard: “Erected by John Coubrough in memory of his daughter Annie died 11 June 1856 aged 24 years.” Stones marking the last rest of people whose parents were both still alive often bear the names of both parents, but Annie’s has only her father. Whether this is because her mother didn’t want to be associated with a wayward daughter or because carving the extra name was too expensive, cannot now be known.
Baby Annie was about three years old when her mother died. Most likely, she was raised by her grandparents, then when they passed on, she stayed to keep house for her bachelor uncle, Alexander. Her Uncle Malcolm moved into the farmhouse at some point, too, but whether it was before or after Annie married is not known. Annie was a 43-year-old first-time bride when she married 46-year-old John McLaren in 1895. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were no children.
Here are some of the things I am still working on.
1. Robert Coubrough, letter carrier, who married Jean/Jane/Janet Muir was most likely the father of John C m. Mary McVean; Elizabeth C m. Alex Kerr; and Jane C m. David McAuslan, but who were Robert’s parents? Was he really the son of Marrion Reid?
2. Thomas, son of Thomas Coubrough & Janet Muir, was christened in Eastwood parish in 1793. We once thought the boy might actually be the son of James Coubrough and Jean Muir; now we’re not so sure. Was there really a Thomas Coubrough and Janet Muir, or were the names of the father and son somehow confused? Were Thomas and Janet related to James and Jean or to Robert and Janet? For that matter, was Robert’s wife called Janet or Jean?
3. Hugh Coubrough who married Georgina Adams was the son of Kate Coubrough, washer and Cleaner. Hugh reported his mother's 1899 death, giving her age as 48, and her parents as Samuel Coubrough and Margaret Bryce. Since Hugh was himself about 38 at the time, his mother had to have been more than 48, but how much more? I have found record neither of any Catherine Coubrough whose father was Samuel, nor any Samuel that could have been that father. If she was born outside Scotland, especially if she came from Ireland, there is little hope of finding her; I’m looking anyway.
3. When I first found James Cowburgh and Jean Muir’s family, I wondered at the 10-year gap between Robert and Matt. Fifteen years later, we’re still wondering, and the space may be even bigger than we thought.
James Coubrough’s first four known sons (James, Malcolm, John & the first William) all belonged to Jean Muir, as did the last three: Matt, Barbara, and the second William. Assuming that James and Jean were the only Coubroughs in Eastwood parish at the time, we also thought that the Robert Coubrough born January 1, 1795, was Jean Muir’s son, even though no mother’s name was given. A question has been raised, however, as to whether Robert might possibly have been James’s son but not Jean’s.
Given the date of the child’s birth, the missing mother’s name might have just been an oversight on the part of a clerk who had celebrated Hogmanay a little too intensely. On the other hand, as a wright, James had some standing in the community, and might have been able to suppress the name of the child’s mother. The register entry looks like it belongs there, rather than being later squished in to fit at the right date, so the missing name looks to be intentional, rather than due to memory failure in a delayed entry.
Little Robert would have been too late to have been the man who married Jean Muir in 1807, and too early to have been their son. Was Robert a brother of Thomas born in 1793, with Roberf’s father being the one whose name is recorded incorrectly, and both boys being sons of the mysterious Thomas and Janet?
Or was he really James and Jean Muir’s son? If he wasn’t, the gap between Jean Muir’s sons William (1791) and Matt (1805), would have been about 14 years, which leads us to two more theories, both with points to recommend them:
∙ Were our James Coubrough and Jean Muir really two different couples with the same names but a generation apart?
∙ Was there only one James Coubrough, but two different wives named Jean Muir?
Was Matt Coubrough b 1805 a son of James Coubrough b 1785, rather than his younger brother? The tiny number of forenames in use at the time (about 8), certainly makes it possible, even probable, that the elder James C’s wife had one or more cousins called Jean Muir, not to mention any number of unrelated women with the same name. It is conceivable that the younger James could have married a woman with the same name as his mother. A man born in 1785 would have been old enough to have a son of his own in 1805, and it would certainly explain the large space between William in 1791 and Matt fourteen years later. Moreover, it would also explain why Matt, Barbara, and William are all the standard two years apart again, after at least a 10-year hiatus.
Or did the first Jean die at or soon after the birth of the first William in 1791, with her widower later marrying another woman with the same name? This would explain the long gap between William and Matt. If James was a widower at the time of Robert’s birth, in 1795, it would account for the lack of a mother’s name in the register, as well as the four years between William and Robert – a long time considering that James’s first four children were almost exactly two years apart.
Of course, there are still also all the other possibilities that have been discussed in this space. James and Jean could have been separated for some time, whether voluntarily or not. One of them could have been sick for a long time, or there could have been other children about whom we know nothing; children who were miscarried or stillborn, or just baptised in another church.
4. We still think Marion Reid’s husband, Malcolm, was the son of Jonet Buchanan and John Coubrough, but we are no closer to proving it. The information from Mr. Ian Brown, in Glasgow, was a bust. Disappointingly, his tree showing Marrion Reid’s husband as the son of Jonet Buchanan turned out to be based on the same supposition and guesswork as our own theory; i.e., he was the right name at the right place at the right time, with his children named the right way for his being Jonet’s son. On the bright side, two strangers have independently come to the same conclusion, so perhaps there is something to the hunches. And the Strathblane churchyard has given us new hope that we are on the right trail.
5. Who is the Alexander Coubrough who married Jane Allan? Is Jane related to the wife of Jean Allan, wife of Jean Muir’s son Matt Coubrough? Alex and Jane had a daugther Elizabeth, who married Joseph Falconer in Glasgow in 1879. Elizabeth was born about 1852, so her parents had to have been contemporary with Matt Coubrough and his wife.
This summer’s trip was my first visit to Scotland. From the countryside I saw, I still don’t know why Scots are not all born with one leg longer than the other. I don’t think I saw anyplace where there were more than 10 square feet of level ground! The other thing I noticed is that no place in Scotland is as far from any other place as Scots think it is. I heard repeatedly that Stirling was quite a ways from Thornliebank, and that Inverness was “way up north.” Going by place names in the records I’ve seen over the years, I had thought that the villages would all be separate entities, with a respectable distance between. Applying my Canadian prairie ideas of distance(12), I was more than a little surprised to find that, not only were most of the Coubrough outposts now suburbs of Glasgow, but that they have been since the mid-1800s. The “villages” are, in fact, all separate entities, but in an insular social sense, rather than a geographic one. People who live two streets apart refer to each other as being from another village, even though, on the map, they butt up against each other.
Several Scots I talked to were astonished that I had driven, in one day, from the city of Stirling to St. Andrews for lunch, then carried on to Edinburgh and Biggar for supper. The fact is, Stirling is less than an hour from Thornliebank, even going through Glasgow on the way. St. Andrews is less than three hours from Stirling, including stops for picture-taking and coffee. Biggar is about an hour from Edinburgh, which, in turn is about two hours from St. Andrews. By Scots standards, I had apparently made a week’s journey that day.
And Inverness, way up north, is an easy afternoon’s drive. Leaving Thornliebank at about 10 AM, we stopped in Stirling to climb all 246 stairs in the Wallace Monument, and stopped in Perth for lunch. We drove up the east side of Loch Ness, arriving in Inverness about 4 PM. We spent an hour there, and drove down the other side of the loch. We stopped for supper, then drove almost half-way down the west side of the loch. After all that, it was still only about 6:30 when we got to our stop for the night at bed-and-breakfast half-way down Loch Ness.
Much of the country we saw, especially in the north-west, looks startlingly like Cape Breton(13) (Nova Scotia, Canada). After endless weeks on the Atlantic, a place that looked so much like home must have been no small comfort to the old folks. We visited the Isle of Rùm(14), just off the north west coast, near Skye, where my husband’s MacKays and McLeans were from. Rùm was once home to about 400 people, nearly all of whom ended up in Cape Breton after the clearance. My husband’s direct ancestors arrived in Cape Breton in about 1810, so it was their brothers and cousins who were cleared in 1826 to make way for sheep. Later in the 19th-century, the island was sold to a man who built himself a castle there in 1898. The castle is now a bed-and-breakfast hotel, and the island belongs to the Scottish Nature Conservancy (SNC). From the remaining evidence, it would be hard to guess that the island has been inhabited by humans for over 2000 years.
On our way to Rùm we drove up one side of Loch Ness and down the other. It was a rainy afternoon, the day we were there, but the surface of the water was smooth. In early August, the very shallow water where loch meets land was cold to my hand. It cleared after supper, and we saw a rainbow—the whole glorious arch—with both ends planted in the loch. With the clear summer light shining flat across the gun-metal grey water, guarded by the grass-cloaked tips of its mountain walls, the loch is heart-breakingly beautiful. While I never saw Nessie, as he is fondly known, it is easy to imagine that he was there, lurking just under the dark surface.
On my trip, I had intended to visit Falkirk, Polmont, Kirkintilloch, Peebles, Killearn, Cumberland, Fintry, and other places where Coubroughs are known to have hung their hats. I knew, of course, that the towns would have changed, but I was completely unprepared for the industrial city that is now Falkirk. The locals still consider Polmont a separate area, but it is, for all intents and purposes, an extension of Falkirk. Likewise, Kirkintilloch and Cumberland are now cities with tens of thousands of people.
I was constantly amazed at how close together all the place names from the Coubrough family past are. Campsie, Haughhead of Campsie, Milton of Campsie, Lennoxtown, and Kirkintilloch are all within 5 miles of each other. None is more than 20 miles from Stirling.
Wemyss(15), in Fife, was one of the furthest outposts of Coubrough settlement, but even it is less than 50 miles from Stirling. Alloa, in Clackmannanshire, with Falkirk, Kincardine, Airth, Fintry, Strathblane, Killearn, Buchlyvie, and Balfron are all less than 30 miles away. Indeed, Stirling itself is only 25 miles from Glasgow. Biggar is half-way between Glasgow and Edinburgh, about 45 miles from both.
Even by Scots measures, on foot and moving all one’s worldly goods, most of the Coubroughs’ perambulations hadn’t been overly long journeys. An exception was the trek from Campsie to Thornliebank, a distance of some 30 miles. As most people did at that time, James and Jean Muir probably walked the whole way. Even if he was well-enough fixed to hire a carrier cart for the household goods and the children, it must have been an arduous trip. The terrain is never flat for more than a few yards at a time the whole way, and even a sturdy walker would have found it daunting at times. They must have been looking forward to a serious improvement in their lives to even think of it.
Footnotes:
1. See the Other Branches section for more.
2. Copyright Anne Cruickshank, 2005. Used with permission.
3. All the legal accounts say they went to Australia, but the1881 census says New Zealand.
4. Helen Dawson Coubrough, 1823 - 1894.
5. John and Jean were 1st cousins once removed; i.e., John’s father & Jean’s grandfather were both sons of Henry Cowbrough & Christian Wright.
6. A small bronze plaque says the tiny cemetery dates from about 1100 AD. In use until the late 1800s, it was either once much bigger or they stacked people up like cordwood.
7. Pronounced YOU-ist.
8. Pronounced "dooker."
9. Near Edinburgh.
10. James, b 1801, was the third son of Malcolm C & Jean Buchanan.
11. These stones were laid flat for two reasons. One was that it prevented the spirit’s rising. The 2nd was more gruesome: it deterred grave robbers.
12. Any place that takes less than half a day to get to is "just up the road."
13. So many Scots settled in Cape Breton that even the place names are the same.
14. Pronounced "rhoom,"as in the interior division of a building.
15. Pronounced "weems."
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