FAN stands for Friends, Associates and Neighbours, and the principle of this technique is that researching the people who surrounded an ancestor may yield clues to their identity when direct documentary evidence is lacking.
I recently had a go at applying it to my elusive great great grandfather, William Clark [see Brick Wall] to see if I could work out who his parents might have been – as I noted in the earlier post, they are the only set of 3x great grandparents that are missing from my tree and I have no baptism or death records for William.
I started by investigating the inhabitants of the fifteen households recorded in Longhill, Lonmay at the time of the 1841 census as my great great grandparents, William and Christian Clark are amongst them, along with my 4 year-old great grandfather, John.
Like William, most of the neighbours are crofters and tracking their lives through census and other records it is notable that they were all born in Lonmay or an adjoining parish, and that multiple generations of a family were often living closely together.
Of immediate interest were two other families named Clark: Andrew Clark, a crofter aged 64, his wife Catherine, and daughter Ann are living next door to his son Alexander, who has a wife and two young sons. Another, illegitimate son of Alexander, 4 year-old James Clark, is living next door to my great great grandparents with his mother, Margaret Singer, and her parents.
According to the census, Andrew Clark was born in Aberdeenshire around 1777 – there is no record of his baptism, and I have not been able to identify his parents. The Lonmay Parish records are not always easy to interpret as the Clerk regularly added baptisms out of sequence, and this is the case with Andrew’s children, who appear together in an entry apparently made some time in 1827: Anne (1806), Christian (1808), Elizabeth (1810), twins Alexander and James (1812) and Margaret (1814). If my William Clark was Andrew’s son, wouldn’t he have been listed too ?
Extract from the 1841 Census for Longhill, Lonmay
[Source: National Records of Scotland]
My next discovery was that the maiden surname of William and Christian’s close neighbour, Mary Stephen, was also Clark. She was born around 1812 in New Deer according to later census listings, and had married William Stephen in Lonmay in 1835 – he is described as a heatherer in 1841 but later became a house thatcher. Frustratingly, her parents were not named when her death was registered in 1889 by the Inspector at Belfatton Poor House.
However, the FAN club proved useful once again as in 1851 and 1861 the Stephens had a niece named Mary Keith Clark living with them, and the death registration for her father, John Clark, does name his parents: William Clark and Mary Copland. John was born around 1811 in Tyrie, and I have since identified another sibling, Charles Clark, who was born in Strichen around 1822. In common with my great great grandfather, William, there are no baptism records for Mary Stephen or either of her brothers.
Widening the search, I discovered a potential marriage for William Clark and Mary Copland in Tyrie in 1809, and I believe that I’ve also found them in both the 1841 and 1851 census: in 1841, they are living at Broomielaw croft, which is just a mile from Longhill, whilst in 1851 they are a similar distance away in New Leeds, Strichen. According to these records, William was a crofter born in New Deer around 1785, whilst Mary was born in the same Parish in about 1781.
As Mary Copland died in New Leeds in 1853, shortly before statutory registration was introduced in Scotland, there is no record of her parents’ names, but the registration of her husband’s death at Redbog Croft, Strichen in 1857 names his father as Alexander Clark, a weaver – the informant was his son-in-law, William Stephen.
All of this is, of course, entirely circumstantial evidence in relation to the origins of my great great grandfather, and I have a lot of further research to do if I am to prove a link. However, my FAN club analysis of the Longhill community in 1841 has generated a good working hypothesis to test since, if my ancestor was born in Aberdeenshire during the 1812 – 1816 window suggested by the 1841 census, he would slot nicely into the timeline of the births of William Clark and Mary Copland’s children.
Could they be my missing 3x great grandparents ? DNA suggests that they just might be as I have five matches who descend from their son, John Clark, as well as one who is descended from his brother, Charles …
Sleuthing Notes 