Finding out what became of my paternal grandmother’s 11 siblings was the catalyst for my interest in family history and, after the best part of 20 years spent searching, I have been able to establish a timeline for most of them and to make contact with many of their descendants.
The exception is the brother closest in age to my grandmother – Arthur Clark, who was born in Peterhead on 7 August 1886. He was just 4 years old when his mother died shortly after the 1891 census was taken and at that time he was living at 4 Reid Street, Maryhill with his father, John Clark, and five of his siblings, including new baby sister, Flora.
A Poor Relief application made by his father in 1897 states that Arthur is living with his elder brother, Thomas William Clark, who by then was married and had three small children of his own, including a son he named Arthur in 1896. When the Clark family was split up after the death of their mother, it seems that Arthur was the only child who was not sent to live with relatives in Canada (Mary Hay, William Steven and Harry Bivar) or fostered (Flora). Was he a favourite ? Did his father want to hold on to just one younger child ? Or was he perhaps simply too young to be sent to Canada but too old to be attractive to foster parents ?
Whatever the reason, Arthur disappears from the Scottish records after that date as there is no trace of him in the 1901 census and no marriage or death records that relate to him.
There is, however, some evidence that he emigrated to Australia. An immigration record from 1907 lists an Arthur Clark, aged 22 and born in Peterhead, working as an assistant steward aboard the SS Makambo which had sailed from Glasgow to Sydney and, according to the Scotland’s People records, my great uncle was the only man of that name ever to be born in Peterhead.
Then, in 1922, a certificate recorded in the New South Wales Register of Seaman suggests that he had risen to become was a Third Class Engineer living in Neutral Street, North Sydney:
Extract from the New South Wales Register of Seamen
Australian records are not quite so easy to research as there is no national index for the birth, marriage and death records which are held by individual territories, and the census records were destroyed after statistical information was collected to protect privacy. As Arthur Clark is a common name, searching for him is no easy task.
The electoral roll for Sydney lists a marine engineer of that name living at a variety of addresses in the north of the city between 1930 – 1943, but there is no way to prove that this is the right man. Arthur does not appear to have married or died in New South Wales, and I have no DNA matches that link to him – he appears in just 6 other trees on Ancestry, all of them belonging to descendants from one of my grandmother’s siblings.
I’ll keep searching but, pending the release of further records or a chance discovery, the fate of Arthur Clark seems likely to remain a mystery.
Sleuthing Notes 