Dunse Bowling Club Silver Prize Medal - Won by P. Robson, Duns, July 1882

This prize medal came up in a Google search for something on Sunday.
I've always wanted to find prize medals won by my ancestors but it's not happened yet though perhaps they didn't win anything that came with a medal.

This prize medal is made of silver and set in an ornate frame.
On one side it says "Presented to the Dunse Bowling Club by Messrs Farrington & Smith Edinr 1878".
on the other, "Won by P. Robson Duns July 1882." with some hallmarks.

He's not in the Duns Monumental Inscriptions volume and I wonder who he was and where he was buried.

Was he one of your ancestors ?

If you're interested in acquiring it, it's offered for sale by Alnwick British & Colonial Coins & Tokens at £50.

See the Flying Scotsman Again

If you're over 60, the sight, smell, sounds of a steam engine will bring back nostalgic memories.

I find they are always a joy to me - a rare joy, admittedly and one that I never experienced in the Borders.

The BBC has a video of the Flying Scotsman on the 40th anniversary of its first public journey. The anniversary took place in 1968 - a non-stop run from King's Cross in London to Edinburgh Waverley where it was welcomed with a pipe band. See Tweedmouth signal box, the train crossing the railway viaduct and Berwick-upon-Tweed in its 1968 colours.

There are several well-known faces on board including Rev Wilbert Awdrey, the author of Thomas the Tank Engine and he describes how he came to write the series.

There are even more steam railway videos in the BBC's collection.

William Wallace, the 'Guardian of Scotland' - new exhibition and talks

There's going to be a new exhibition about William Wallace, the'Guardian of Scotland', in the Parliament in Edinburgh from 10th August to 8th September (closed 12th and 13th August and Sundays). Opening times are 10am to 5pm (except 9am to 6.30pm on 4th to 6th September.) Admission will be free. 

The centrepiece of the exhibition will be the letter of 1300 from the King Philip IV of France to his agents at the Papal Court in Rome asking them to assist Wallace in his business before the Pope and the 'Lübeck letter' issued in 1297 in the names of William Wallace and Andrew Moray or Murray, inviting the ports of Lübeck and Hamburg to resume trade with Scotland. 

This is a chance to go beyond the fictionalised version of William Wallace and Scottish history portrayed by the 'Braveheart' film and discover the story behind the real William Wallace. Oddly for such an important man, Wallace's family history isn't clear. I find it difficult to believe that he would have achieved as much as he did without being a good soldier or having personal followers and that's not likely unless he was born into a landowning (and probably noble) family.

Associated with the exhibition is a free talk 'The Attempted Restoration: Wallace's Support of King John, 1299-1302' by Dr Amanda Beam-Frazier of the University of Glasgow. She will talk about the efforts to restore John Balliol as king of Scots after his abdication in 1296 and reflect on Balliol's motivation to return, as well as the political and diplomatic context from 1299 to 1302. The talk is on 24th August at the Parliament from 10am to 11am. Online bookings for 'The Attempted Restoration: Wallace's Support of King John, 1299-1302 or on 0131 348 5405.

There's another event from 11.30 to 12.30 on the same day, 'Sir William Wallace, Scotland and the wider world' - a debate by a panel that includes Dr Fiona Watson, Professor Michael Prestwich and other historians. Members of the audience will get the chance to quiz the panel about Wallace and the momentous decades for Scotland from 1286 to 1306. The debate will be chaired by the Presiding Officer, Tricia Marwick, MSP. Online bookings for Sir William Wallace, Scotland and the wider world or on 0131 348 5405.

The exhibition and these two talks are part of the Festival of Politics at the Parliament taking place from 17th to 25th August, and there are other talks, exhibitions, concerts. You can download the whole Festival of Politics programme.

Come to the East India Company at Home Study Day, Edinburgh

In January, I wrote about Warwick University's East India Company at Home project which will examine how luxury goods from Asia (mainly India) arrived in wealthy homes and their significance.

The project is holding a Study Day on Friday 7th September from 11.30am to 5pm at the University of Edinburgh Library.

The purpose of the event is to bring together academics, curators, heritage sector professionals, local and family historians who are interested in Scottish families, houses and objects with East India Company connections. The event is a follow-up to a study day they held at the British Library in London earlier this year although the focus is different.

The focus in Edinburgh will be on family history and literary sources (poems, stories, family letters and other manuscripts) and will also spend some time looking at the collection of manuscripts brought back by Company servants in order to consider how East India Company officials collected, read and exchanged books. It will also discuss the different ways in which East India Company officials and their families used ideas of family, home and the domestic space when navigating their imperial experiences.

The Study Day is free of charge and lunch will be provided. If you would like to go, email Ellen Filor (who is interested in East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire between 1780 and 1857) at East.India.Company@warwick.ac.uk.

April Fools Day

Yesterday (1st April) was April Fools Day, an especially significant day in our family; my grandparents, parents, and siblings loved making April Fools of each other and our friends and neighbours.

I was always apprehensive for several weeks before April Fools Day and I was into my teens before I was successful in not getting fooled.

Of course I played my part in fooling others.

Nowadays, April Fools seems to be barely observed, except in the media.

This year we had the Prime Minister asking Shaun Ryder to advise on class and help to detox Tories, the new Thermal Reduction Initiative (Champagne) to add 9% duty to all chilled champagne sold in public places, bagpipe music arousing the Edinburgh zoo pandas, and Google's new Click-to-Teleport Extensions for websites allowing potential customers to instantly teleport to the website's business location directly from a search ad. I would particularly welcome such an innovation. It's often said that the best part of a holiday is the journey but that's rarely true for me; perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.

Did you catch these ?

I found these Australian April Fools interesting.

From Kelso to Kalamazoo

I’ve just returned from our November open meeting in Melrose.  The speaker was Margaret Jeary who talked about the memoirs of George Taylor who was born in Yetholm in 1803 and died in Michigan in 1891.   George was the son of a shepherd and grew up in a literate household.  He first went to school when he was seven and was taught by a pupil teacher aged 18.  He was an avid reader throughout his life and a self-educated man.  He became a fluent writer using clear evocative English.

George’s journal or memoirs came to light as part of a local history project by Eckford Woman’s Rural Institute.  With the help of an IT literate daughter they were first in published on the web.  In 2009 “From Kelso to Kalamazoo” appeared in book form as part of the Flashbacks series published by the National Museum of Scotland.  (From Kelso to Kalamazoo: The Life and Times of George Taylor, 1803–1891Margaret Jeary and Mark Mulhern Eds: NMS Enterprises, Edinburgh 2009. ISBN: 9781905267279).

The book is full of delightful little vignettes of 19^th century life in rural Scotland.  The author tells of getting drunk for the first time as a teenager after helping with sheep washing.  He so disliked the result that he eventually signed the pledge.  To save the coach fare he would walk to Edinburgh – 50 miles in around  36 hours.  On one trip to Edinburgh he saw an advert for a train trip to Burns Country and in Alloway he met an old lady who said that she was Tam O’Shanter’s wife.  Another train trip to the Great Exhibition in 1851 was on a Sunday.  George, a devout church man, squared his conscience by handing out religious tracts on the train.

George Taylor became a market gardener eventually becoming foreman of a Kelso market garden.  He thought about his work carefully and found that protecting potato plants with straw reduced the instance of blight at a time that it was ravaging the potato crop in both Ireland and Scotland,  He also observed that there was a connection between water and the spread of cholera.

In 1855 George Taylor emigrated to the United States and started a truck farm in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  The soil there was ideally suited to celery which he introduced into the USA.  Clearly this was a successful enterprise as George was able to return to Scotland twice.   On the first occasion he returned with his third wife.  In all he had 4 wives and 9 children but all four wives and 5 of the children died before him.

Thank you to Margaret Jeary for a clear and interesting talk.

Our next meeting is on 26th February 2012 in Melrose when Peter Munro will talk about Saving, Spending and Family History.

New Map Comparison Tool from the Visualising Urban Geography Project

There's a new tool from the Visualising Urban Geography project that allows you to compare two different maps of Edinburgh side by side on the screen.

We've always had the capability to do this manually using two paper maps but it's very laborious and not very easy to compare like with like.

This new tool uses geo-referenced maps which are overlaid on top of the current street map, and you can decide which maps to compare.

For family historians, this has several great benefits; you can see, at a glance:

• how streets have developed since the previous map
• where new buildings are
• where streets have disappeared
• which streets have been renamed

and that will make it easier than ever to look at census records, view the route taken by the census enumerator, and go directly to the site of an ancestor's dwelling, and if you're lucky the actual dwelling itself.

Also, I think it will be helpful when looking at valuation rolls to see what a street looked like before or after.

The picture shows an area of Spring Gardens, Edinburgh. Notice how a bit of land to the right of St Ann's Bank House in the top map (1849) has become a row of buildings, Violet Bank, in the bottom map (1876).

Have a go at using the dual map tool, yourself, and let me know what you think.

If you want to change map when you're in the tool, click the [clear overlay] link to remove the map, then click the new map you want.

Of course, the great drawback for us is that it allows only the comparison of Edinburgh maps, however, as it has been done for Edinburgh, it presumably can be done for other places, too; and that's another great reason to get on with the geo-referencing of historical maps.

Visualising Urban Geography Launch Event

Last Thursday (23 February) I attended the launch event of the 'Visualising Urban Geography' project at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. About 80 other people attended. There was an introduction to the project at the Addressing History launch event in November, and I reported on the December Visualising Urban Geography workshop that provided a chance to try out one of the tools, ExtMap (now Map Builder), that the project had developed using sample data produced by the project.

In last week’s event, Professor Richard Rodger discussed the objectives of the project:

• to create geo-referenced maps of Edinburgh
• to develop software that could be used for free
• to reach a broader public
• to develop dynamic maps so as to further knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries

He gave interesting examples in the ways, the tools developed have been used; we saw the development of Edinburgh over time, easy ways to calculate the area size and the length of the perimeter of irregularly shaped plots of land. He suggested other sets of data that might be used with these tools:

• landowners and property holdings
• shareholders
• store and credit card holders
• utility bills
• census information

The new tools, ExtMap and MapBuilder, use a Google interface for viewing maps and the open source Thematic Mapping Engine.

Chris Fleet discussed the mapping results of the project including a demonstration of geo-referencing and suggested this would be a good tool to use for mapping burial grounds.

Professor Bob Morris talked about the massive impact this project will have on historical analysis. He said that images, graphs and maps are more important in
writing about history than ever before. He used examples to compare the ration of women to men in Edinburgh's 19th century population.

Lastly, Dr Gittings, a geographer at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out how this project has brought history and geography closer than ever before.

Borders Family History Society has been closely involved with the project since the December workshop, and our goal of representing poor relief recipients in Melrose and Jedburgh representation on dynamic maps was mentioned as one of the case studies. For me, there’s been a steep learning curve in using the new tools, ExtMap and MapBuilder, to produce these maps, however, we’re very grateful for the support we’ve had from Stuart Nicol in using these tools and from Professor Rodger in analysing the results.

In our research into poor relief, we transcribed the core information exactly as it’s written, but that was not the end of the process for creating these maps. In the case of Jedburgh, the Poor Law Inspector did not record the town name of Jedburgh, so I had to add that for Jedburgh addresses. For Melrose, the inspector abbreviated many road names (often in different ways) and they needed to be manually expanded. Any addresses that are unrecognised get assigned to 0 degrees latitude and longitude, which is in the ocean to the west of southern Africa, so such addresses need to be removed or substituted with the modern address and that has been a lot more work. We have so much data that the tool is quite slow at creating the map co-ordinates, and I found that for each set of data there’s a re-iterative process – run the tool, check the results, resolve the problems and repeat until there are no more errors. The tool uses a vast database created by Google of addresses, and that imposes limitations, as their database is not completely accurate.

Residential Addresses of Poor Law Recipients in Jedburgh and Melrose

Have a look at our initial attempt at mapping the residential addresses of poor relief recipients. The image is a snapshot, click the link to see the full interactive map. There's still a bit of work to be done on this map.
Each pin represents one or more recipients - we can't yet show the number of recipients represented, however clicking on a pin shows the information about one of the recipients.
Click on the ticks on the layers to the left of the map to select or deselect specific layers corresponding to our different publications.

The main drawbacks are:

• There are still some recipients positioned off the coast of Africa
• Only recipients in and around Jedburgh from our Jedburgh publications have been included
• The pink pins represent Melrose 1871 to 1874, the blue pins representing the other publications
• Each pin represents one or more recipients - we can't yet show the number of recipients represented

We hope you find this map as interesting as we do.
These are early days in the use of this tool, and we expect to be able to use it more effectively in the future.

We would like to have your feedback (using the comments link below), especially any suggestions you have for further improvements and suggestions of other data sets that you would like to see mapped.

Updated Visualising Urban Geography Workshop

You may remember that I went to an interesting Visualising Urban Geography workshop on 6th December 2010 to explore their new web-based resources. They're running an updated free workshop at 2.00 to 4.30 pm on Thursday 24 February at the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge,
Edinburgh, EH1 1EW (see map), so expect to see a variety of maps and photos of Edinburgh; information on using and creating geo-referenced maps, the Visualising Urban Geography project bringing together sets of historical geo-referenced maps, social and demographic information to analyse and present data, and to get experience of using one of their tools, ExtMap (now Map Builder), to plot a set of trades-people on a map of Edinburgh. I've successfully used this tool to plot recipients of poor law relief on a historical map of Jedburgh. I recommend the workshop, though I hope the weather will be better this time, and you can phone 0131 623 3918 to book your place or book online.

Visualising Urban Geography Workshop at National Library of Scotland

Poor Relief Recipients (with identifiable Edinburgh addresses) from Jedburgh and Melrose parishes Poor Law Records volumes 1852-1930

At the AddressingHistory Launch Event, Professor Richard Rodger mentioned a workshop on 6th December at the Maps Reading Room, National Library of Scotland, to explore their new web-based resources, based on the work they've done for Edinburgh; and in spite of the snowy conditions, I attended this. Although they advertised the workshop for a general audience, it contained a lot of discussion about the technologies involved in the website, as well as a hands-on opportunity to show a set of data on a map.

Chris Fleet began by showing us a variety of maps, prospect views, plans, aerial photos, and digital maps of Edinburgh, all part of the 20,000 items digitised over the last 15 years. Key to this is their collection of geo-referenced maps, maps that can be perfectly positioned in relation to another map by using lots of co-ordinates, and it’s these maps that allow data about locations of people and objects to be combined with maps. Chris demonstrated how new geo-referenced maps could be produced using free technology and said he would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in volunteering to produce new maps.

Professor Richard Rodger then demonstrated the Visualising Urban Geography project with some exciting tools bringing together sets of historical geo-referenced maps, social and demographic information to analyse and present data in more detail than at the AddressingHistory launch in November. He showed Edinburgh as a collection of registration districts, the growth of Edinburgh since medieval times, as a comparison of sanitary districts and property rents, as a comparison of advocates and solicitors homes over time, the occupations of Edinburgh’s colony residents and discussed the historical reasons for the changes we saw on the maps.
He showed too, how they could accurately measure distances and areas of land, which could be useful to a lot of professions.

Stuart Nicol discussed the technologies involved which was rather complicated, and I think most of us were glad that this was followed by a coffee break.

After the break we had a go at using one of their tools, ExtMap (now Map Builder), to plot a set of trades-people on a map of Edinburgh, using spreadsheet sets of data that Professor Rodger’s team had extracted from a 1911 post office directory. There were coal merchants, cycle repairers, dairymen, egg-producers, and many other trades. Using their instructions, I managed to plot the egg- producers, who surprisingly were concentrated in northeast Edinburgh and on the road to Leith. Professor Rodger explained that often it’s difficult to guess, when looking at a mass of data, what plotting locations on a map will show, but the resulting map often presents new insights.

Since the workshop I’ve used the data from our publications of Poor Law Records for Melrose and Jedburgh to plot recipients of poor relief (see the yellow circles), who lived in Edinburgh, and that's in the picture. I'd like to be able to show this as an interactive web page, and a future intention is to show recipients in Jedburgh on a map, and those recipients that lived in the bit of Galashiels that was in Melrose parish on a map of Galashiels.

Abandoned Visit to Edinburgh Castle

On Saturday, 27th November, I went with a friend to Edinburgh Castle to take advantage of the weekend of free access to many Historic Scotland properties to celebrate St Andrews Day on 30th November.

It was a bitterly cold day, and as you can see in these videos, there was a lot of ice and snow on the ground.





I was really surprised that Historic Scotland hadn't gritted the public access areas of the grounds, and the sloping path up to the main bit of the castle was so slippery that we abandoned our intention and went home. I really hope that Historic Scotland will do better next time.

Still I hope you like the skyline views of snowy Edinburgh.

AddressingHistory - Finding Individuals and Professionals in Post Office Directories on Maps

I'm not often so impressed.

The beta search site from AddressingHistory, a partnership between EDINA and the National Library of Scotland using materials already digitised, is an online tool aimed at a broad range of users, both within and outwith academia (particularly local history groups and genealogists), to combine data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office directories with contemporaneous historical maps.

The project will focus on three eras of Edinburgh mapping and Post Office directories (1784-5, 1865, 1905-6) however the technologies demonstrated will eventually include the National Library of Scotland's full collection of digitised materials including 400 directories and associated maps covering the whole of Scotland.

The online tool currently allows you to search by surname, place or profession within a specific Scottish Post Office directory for Edinburgh and Leith. You can choose whether to have overlays of maps by Alexander Kincaid, 1784; Bartholomew Post Office Plan, 1865; Johnston Post Office Plan, 1905.

In this example, I searched for doctors for the 1865 directory and got this great image,

which I can move around, zoom into and out of. The map is followed by a listing of the search results (in this case, 116 doctors), and there's a blue kite-shaped pin for each result. Hovering over a pin shows the name of the associated individual. I can click on an individual result and see the corresponding page from the Post Office directory. Most of the doctors are in and around the New Town area, with a few around the University of Edinburgh, and on the road down to Leith, and that's surprising; I expected that the doctors would have been dispersed over a wider area.

Try the AddressingHistory site yourself.

There's a launch event in Edinburgh on Wednesday 17th November with a packed half day of talks and demonstrations at the National Library of Scotland (NLS):

Programme
• Welcome – Cate Newton (Director of Collections and Research, NLS)
• Introduction – Professor Robert Morris (Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History , University of Edinburgh)
• AddressingHistory presentation and launch – Stuart Macdonald (AddressingHistory Project Manager, EDINA) & Nicola Osborne (AddressingHistory Project Officer & Social Media Officer, EDINA))
• Visualising Urban Geography project – Professor Richard Rodger (Professor of Economic and Social History, University of Edinburgh)
• Statistical Accounts of Scotland – Dr Helen Chisholm (EDINA)
• NLS Digitised Historic Mapping – Chris Fleet (Senior Map Curator, NLS)
• Tobar An Dualchais – Kenny Beaton (School Of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh)
• Internet Archive digitisation project(s) – Lee Hibberd /Ines Mayfarth (NLS)
• Wrap Up followed by demonstrations


There will be videos of the speakers online after the event.

(With thanks to Scottish Genes for making me aware of the event)

Edinburgh, Lothians and Borders Archaeology Conference 2010

I just picked up a leaflet about this conference at Galashiels Library yesterday.

This is an annual conference organised by the City of Edinburgh Council, East Lothian Council and Scottish Borders Council. It provides an  opportunity to hear and discuss first hand accounts of the archaeological fieldwork and research being undertaken in south-east Scotland.

It's a very interesting programme.

0900 - 0930 Registration, tea & coffee
0930 - 0935 Welcome: (Scottish Borders Council)
0935 - 1000 The Lewisvale Park Roman Altars
John Gooder (AOC Archaeology Group)
1000 - 1025 The Lost Northumbrian Cross of Jedburgh:
An Anglo-Saxon Cross Base in the Scottish Borders
Dr Christopher Bowles (Scottish Borders Council)
1025 - 1035 Discussion
1035 - 1105 COFFEE/TEA BREAK
1105 - 1130 St Andrews Kirk, Gullane: A facelift for a Norman Church
Bill Nimmo (Gullane and Dirleton History Society) and
Diana Sproat (AOC Archaeology Group)
1130 - 1155 Medieval grave-slabs at Temple
Ian Fraser (RCAHMS)
1155 - 1220 A line through Edinburgh: Edinburgh Trams the story so far
John A Lawson (CECAS)
1220 - 1245 Discussion
1245 - 1345 LUNCH
1345 - 1410 Revisiting Roxburgh: Creating a 3D GIS
Piers Dixon (RCAHMS)
1410 - 1435 Clues to the Past: The Eddleston Parish Project
Trevor Cowie (Peeblesshire Archaeological Society)
1435 - 1500 Tweed not Tweel: Textile production on the Teviot
Alistair Robertson (Headland Archaeology)
1500 - 1515 Discussion
1515 - 1545 COFFEE/TEA BREAK
1545 - 1610 POW’s, Soldiers or displaced persons: Excavations at Frogston Road
Camp, Edinburgh
Bruce Glendinning (CFA Archaeology)
1610 - 1635 The Portobello Potteries: New documentary and shard evidence
George Haggarty (NMS Research Fellow)
1635 - 1700 Discussion

It's on Saturday, November 20th (9am - 5pm) at the Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh (next to Musselburgh railway station).

Tickets £20 each, Concessions £12, Buffet Lunches can be pre-booked at £8.

More information.

A Black Sheep in the Family ?

(With thanks to Chris Paton's blog Edinburgh born WDYTYA man's Nazi grandfather and The Herald, Scotland.)

Reported in the Herald, Martin Davidson, the BBC’s commissioning editor for history, which includes a favourite genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?, discovered that his German grandfather, Bruno Langbehn, had been one of the first members of the Nazi party, a high-ranking SS officer, and colleague of the architects of the Holocaust.

That's a good pretext for asking genealogists whether we're scared to research our family history deeply in case we unearth something we don't like, whether it's ancestors who did something bad, held ideas that we find repugnant, failed
in business, deserted the family.

Should we be scared ?

Generally, we can't be held responsible for what our ancestors thought or did, but perhaps we are responsible for what our children do.
If genealogy or family history consisted only of creating family tree charts and getting back as many generations as possible, I doubt there would be much of a following; and I think it's finding out more about our ancestors and the times in which they lived that makes family history so interesting.

That's why Borders Family History Society has always been keen on researching social history as well as transcribing monumental inscriptions and publishing.
Past publications have included foreign births, marriages, deaths reported in local newspapers, Days of Our Youth - Memories of Melrose, Dunse Barony Records (transcription of Court Records), Full of Egotism, the Diary of Rev John Hastie, Edrom, Jedburgh Parish Poor Law Records (1852-1874), Jedburgh Parish Poor Law Records (1875-1893), Kelso Poor Law and Ragged School Records, Melrose War Memorial, The Kirk Yetholm Gypsies.

We're working on other publications, Criminal Records, Lunatic Records, Melrose Parish Poor Law Records, Police Records too.

However many of these show our ancestors in a very poor light.

Recently, I helped a friend research a lady on her family tree who had been committed to a lunatic asylum for striking pictures in her house with a walking stick, however, she wonders whether that lady's descendants fear people knowing that their ancestor had mental health problems.

Another record was about a man who had suicidal tendencies, deeply depressed because he was ashamed of deeds done when he was younger. I shied away from mentioning the nature of his deeds and identifying him other than by his forename in my article for the Border Telegraph because it is a family newspaper - I would not want his descendants, some of whom might be school children, bullied, ostracised, traumatised because of what their ancestor did.

However, was that the correct decision ?

Is it worse to have an ancestor that was transported to Australia for stealing a purse, than to have one that was jailed for poaching or assault ?

Lastly, there are also a lot of websites that list people with criminal or lunatic pasts, for example, Black Sheep Ancestors and London Lives 1690-1820. Should such sites be allowed ?

I would be interested in your comments.

If you have any comments, please let me know by clicking the 'comments' link below.

An Interesting and Useful Photo Site

I found this very nice photo site yesterday, while looking for a photo of Dingleton Asylum to use in the volumes of Melrose Poor Law Records being researched now and in preparation for a talk I'm giving in October, and I saw a reference to their postcard index.

Although the bulk of the photos are based in and around Edinburgh, there are others from further afield including some in the Borders: a Texaco petrol pump at Peebles, a postcard of Coldingham,  and as we've recently published our Monumental Inscriptions volume for Longformacus, Berwickshire, I'm showing with Peter Stubbs' kind permission, a photo of Longformacus village well.


There's also a nice selection of railway pictures including Jedburgh Railway Station and Selkirk Railway Station,  maps and a host of links to other sites.

I didn't find a picture of Dingleton Asylum, so if you've got one, and would be happy for me to use it, please let me know. I'd also like a picture of Millholme Asylum, Musselburgh, as that's where many people went before Dingleton was opened.

To comment on this article, please click the 'comments' link below.  

Burke and Hare Murders

The BBC have a picture of the Lawnmarket, Edinburgh around the time of the Burke and Hare murders.

To comment on this article, please click the 'comments' link below. 

Edinburgh Register of Aliens

A few days ago, Strath from New Zealand alerted readers of our forum to a potentially very interesting source of information.

It is a transcription, I imagine, of core information in Edinburgh Registers of Aliens recorded between 1794 and 1825.

It lists first names and surname, age, place of birth, residence, residence - pre-arrival, residence in Scotland, occupation, port of arrival, date of arrival, date registered, notes.

The first page of the PDF says
"....The first is a handwritten volume of declarations given in by foreigners before the Magistrates as to their origins, occupation, length of time in the Country and the intended duration of their stay in Edinburgh. Most declarations were made in 1794.....
The Registers in the second series are bound volumes of pro-formas of questions to be asked and answered before Magistrates regarding the name, origins, status, occupation, age and intentions of foreign visitors. Also given in these volumes, are the current addresses of the respondents as well as the names of the British ports through which they first entered the Country. They cover the period 1798-1825."

These were troubling times, and clearly the authorities needed to know more about resident foreigners. France declared war on Britain on 1st February 1793, in early September, the French National Convention began the 'Reign of Terror' measures to uphold the principles of the French Revolution.

In 1795, Napoleon had his first success in invading Italy, by capturing Milan; and other cities and areas were captured subsequently. The war between Britain and France ended in May 1802 with the the treaty of Amiens, though it began a year later when Britain declared war on France. In May 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of France, though he wasn't crowned until December; and in 1805 he was crowned King of Italy.

Most of these foreigners were from France, Italy and the USA, but others came from Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland.

There were a lot of medical students, almost all from the USA, and some people had quite unusual occupations, though there none listed as spies.

Not surprisingly, all their addresses were in or around Edinburgh; but their ports of arrival were all over Britain.

Clearly, this resource is full of interest.

I suggest you download the Register of Aliens for yourself.

To comment on this article, please click the 'comments' link below.