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.

Social Media Surgery with David McGillivray, University of the West of Scotland

David Rudram and I had a meeting with David McGillivray of the University of the West of Scotland Social Media project at Melrose yesterday to discuss how Borders Family History Society can use social media more effectively.

David reviewed our use of Twitter, Facebook, our blog, our forum and helped us link Twitter, Facebook and our blog together, and made some specific suggestions.

There are a number of action points that we need to do:

• Rationalise our Facebook pages.
•  Enable more Council members to use our Twitter account and that means taking my name and picture off the account and putting the Borders Family History Society identity and logo on it. Of course, I'll still tweet family history on it but I'll set up a new personal Twitter account, too.
• Publicise our Twitter, Facebook, and blog on our publications, emails, and website, and provide the information to our online members and friends in more places.
• Enable visitors to bookmark our web pages.

It was a very useful meeting for us. Both David Rudram and I learnt a lot.

We'll be making the changes, gradually, over the next few weeks.

We would love to have your comments on our progress, and your suggestions for improvements, too.

You can comment by clicking the comments link below or via our Contacts page, selecting the 'Comments about the website' contact type or just come and speak to David Rudram or myself at one of our meetings.

Trade and Street Directories

About a year ago, I blogged about street directories produced both by the Post Office and their availability online at the National Library of Scotland and as maps at AddressingHistory. 

Trade and street directories are useful in confirming information found in the census or as an alternative to valuation rolls.

My recommendation in our Kith and Kin columns in the Border Telegraph and Peeblesshire News newspapers was a collection of freely downloadable Scottish directories , however there’s an easier source on the National Library’s page of Post Office directories, (for Borders localities, choose Scotland).

I’ve now discovered another useful website that contains local and trade directories for England and Wales between 1750 to 1919. You can search by decade (1850s to 1910s), by location or by keywords (a combination of location, decade, and other details) and the directories are free to read and print, however you can print only one page at a time.