Megsmire

Back in 1994 I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Nichol Forest in Cumberland, where my TURNBULL ancestors (great grandmother Ellen TURNBULL and her parents) came from, and to research them in the Carlisle Record Office.
While there I noted any likely looking information that may at some stage connect, even if I didn't know exactly how, where or when at the time.
One such was the 1842 will of Walter of Megsmire (which place I visited, or at least where I decided it probably was from census data). It was a very detailed will, and sexist (but of its time), dividing his moss up into sixths, with each of five sons getting one sixth but three daughters sharing the remaining sixth.
Walter survived to appear in the 1841 census as a 75 year old, but that didn't lead me to match him up to the known Nichol Forest families.
Yesterday however George, a descendant, provided me with a copy of Walter's 1842 death cert, which gave his age as 80, and an added impetus to try again, given that between then and now much more research on TURNBULL baptisms had occurred.
I now believe Walter to be the son of James TURNBULL & Betty BELL, and baptised in 1762 (at Canonbie). This makes George and I 7th cousins, which has taken us at least 9 years of (very) intermittent correspondence trying to prove our relationship via the TURNBULLs.

With both yesterday's news re Lester LESLIE aka Jack WALSH, and this TURNBULL reshuffle, my webpages have been updated, and the next batch of changes included in my WorldConnect database LornaHenderson (Walter has been shifted from LornaPotential, which has also had an update, as has the data I contribute to OneGreatFamily, which can include other families unrelated to me, but of relevance to the FAIRBAIRN and RUNCIMAN DNA projects and One Name Studies - FAIRBAIRN, RUNCIMAN).

I even had a rush of blood to my head and also gave the much less often updated Rootsweb pages a refresh. They don't contain as much supplementary information as my main pages, but will hopefully still exist long after I've ceased paying for my own domain name.

Ditch hopping or is it pond swimming?

Yet more HENDERSON/McGREGOR findings, mostly on the JACK branch. No wonder they were a bit elusive in the USA census returns, ditch hopping seems to be the norm as a couple of families returned to Scotland, then back to the States. This included the elusive Robert JACK, who pops up in the Royal Navy, marrying back in Edinburgh in 1916, to a Scottish lass who had emigrated to the States back in 1910. They returned (to New York in 1920 thus missing the census that year) and show up in Florida in 1930 (which is where Linda found them and put me onto this trail).

Loved the will of one John SCOTT, bachelor of Piperdeanregg, Nicholforest. Wonder how his niece Barbara LITTLE and Rebecca ARMSTRONG, relationship unstated, got on sharing the cottage &  garden? One got the front room and East half of the garden, the other the back room and the West half of the garden.

Aug 28, 2007: Crossing the styx (Border)

Small world territory. Bridget has helped me a lot with my Cumberland research, and had a query about information available about a possible relation of hers here in NZ. Turned out he has a monument erected to him on Mt Egmont. I found a picture of it, and it looks amazingly like the one I have a picture of me and my Grannie sitting at the base of, back when I was around 10.
Which was incidental to her reporting that the Canonbie MIs she was reading had my TURNBULL family in them. No wonder I couldn't find a grave for them in Nichol Forest, I was looking on the wrong side of the Border. They may well have lived their entire lives around Nichol Forest in Cumberland, but when their son Walter died aged 4 in 1826 it looks like they buried him in his mother's home ground instead of theirs, Canonbie in Scotland. Robert's page has therefore been updated and the two children added to the web pages.