The dreaded brick wall occurs when, despite much research effort over several years, the origins of an ancestor remain a mystery. In my own case, I’ve been pretty lucky as I’ve been able to trace most lines in my tree back as far as records allow, but there is one notable exception: my great great grandfather, William Clark.
The only clues I have to his birth are from the 1841 Scotland census, where he is recorded as a 25 year-old crofter, born in Aberdeenshire, who is living at Longhill, Lonmay with his wife and my great grandfather, John Clark, who is 4 years old. As the 1841 census rounded ages down to the nearest 5 years, this would put his birth date somewhere between 1812 – 1816, but there is no trace of a baptism in any of the Aberdeenshire Parish Registers. This is not unusual as there are many gaps in these non-statutory records and, where they do exist, poorer families were often unable to afford the fees for baptising their children.
Apart from that, the only records relating to William are for his marriage to Christian Clark in Fraserburgh on 18 May 1834, and for the baptisms of their sons, John (1838) and William (1842), in Lonmay. They had a daughter as well: Margaret, who was born in Strichen in 1835 according to census records. Christian’s maiden name was also Clark so she may have been related to William, although it is a common name and I have not been able to establish any link between their families so far.
After 1842, William disappears from the Scottish records, and from the lives of his wife and children. In 1851, Christian is a pauper living in New Leeds, Strichen with Margaret and William junior, and a series of entries in the Roll of Poor that appear to relate to her begin in 1845 with the ominous words “woman Clark deserted by her husband”.
For many years, the only other clues I had to William’s fate were from the census records, where Christian is not described as a widow until 1871, and from the children’s marriage certificates, which include the word “deceased” after their father’s name from 1866. This suggested both a possible range of dates for his death and also that his family were receiving some news of him.
William’s whereabouts after 1842 remained a complete mystery until just last year, when an archivist at the Glasgow Records Office unearthed a Poor Relief application made in 1897 by his son, John Clark, which included these remarkable words:
My reaction to reading this undoubtedly shattered the peace of the research room ! I am now attempting to get to grips with Canadian records and am working my way through the many William Clarks they inevitably include. There are no obvious candidates in the censuses compiled in 1851 or 1861 so far and, as statutory records did not begin in Canada until 1869, there is unlikely to be a record of William’s death if it did indeed occur before 1866.
The location of Whitebay is also not easy to pin down, not least because many Canadian places have been renamed over the years and there is always the possibility that whoever supplied the information misspelled it. The likeliest options are all in Ontario, which was a popular destination for migrants from Aberdeenshire.
Discovering that his family appear to have known where William had gone means that I have had to revise my assumptions about his disappearance – it was not uncommon for migrant men to seek to establish themselves in the new country before their wives and children joined them, and this could well have been his intention. Why his family never joined him is likely to remain unknown, though I live in hope that someday the story may have filtered down to a distant cousin.
Why he left in the first place can also only ever be the subject of speculation. I wrote in my post on migrants that the driver was often the loss of hope amongst young agricultural workers that they could one day achieve independence, but William already had his croft in 1841 at a relatively young age.
The New Statistical Account of Scotland, published in 1845, states that small farms in Lonmay are often not sufficiently profitable to maintain the occupiers and their families after the payment of rent, but a comparison of the occupants of Longhill in 1841 and 1851 suggests that this alone would not account for William’s departure. In 1841, fifteen households are recorded with seven of them occupied by crofters, whilst in 1851 there are thirteen with seven farmers each working 10 – 15 acres. Half of these households are still occupied by the same family, which doesn’t seem to indicate that making a living there was impossible or that the tenants of the Kininmonth estate were being forced out by the actions of the landowner, James Russell of Aden.
Perhaps the answer lies in the estate papers of the Russell family, which I hope to view in the archives of the University of Aberdeenshire later this year.
Sleuthing Notes 