Oral family tradition?

Had a bit of a chuckle at the birthplace recorded for the ancestor of a newfound DNA rellie when I went looking to see what other family trees were out there
Birth:July 25 1811 - Scotland
Birth: July 25 1811 - Forgetbrainhead, Dunfriesshire, Scotland

The actual entry shows

Born 22 Jul 1810 - Forgebraehead (which is how my match shows it in his tree as well)

Love to hear from any descendants of Christopher GRAHAM and Jannet GRIEVE of Forgebraehead who may have ventured into DNA testing for genealogy - this is the most likely looking line of my match's ancestry to find a connection on.
Although this only leads to the morass of GRAHAMs and related names in the Dumfries/Cumberland areas without any obvious actual family to connect us up at the moment, it would be good to narrow down the match to this line if at all possible.

SINTON * two

Fascinating where a posting on my guestbook can lead.
Bronwyn left a query asking if I had any clues about her children's 3greats grandmother Catherine SINTON.
Most definitely.
We have now both solved mysteries.
I now know both who the mysterious Catherine in Alford Forest was, and what happened to Catherine in my SINTON tree - one and the same person, or at least I strongly suspect so.

Then a day or so later, Bronwyn casually mentions that she thought Catherine's sister had also emigrated and settled in Alford Forest.
And so it turned out.
There are an awful lot of GRIEVEs to sort out, so anyone interested in helping with who belongs to which GRIEVE family around the Alford Forest/Methven/Rakaia area, please do get in touch.

A few more pins have been placed on the SINTON map.

One thing leads to another

Continuing the recent activity from the WIGHT/THOMSON review led Harry to recheck for more of his WIGHT/STEPHENSONs, and of course I got sidetracked onto them as well.
Both of us were surprised to find another child, or possibly 2, in the family of William STEVENSON and Agnes RAMAGE, having found "mother", Mrs STEVENSON, living with a previously unknown son Thomas, and his brother William, in Selkirk in 1901 (bit lucky that, she died in 1901).
Thomas pre-dated her marriage to hubby William and shows up on FamilySearch Scotland Births and Baptisms as Thomas RAMAGE and was brought up by a William & Eliza BEATTIE as both adopted son, and nephew (my unchecked assumption is that Eliza might be Agnes' sister).
William however  was born Melrose, in Dec 1872 to William and Agnes (RAMAGE) STEVENSON, as William Robert STEVENSON.
But having found him in 1891 and 1901 he then disappears.
A tree on ancestry provided a hint that a chap of the right age, but no parents provided, had a daughter Margaret Hamilton STEVENSON who married in Australia (Ian Murray THOMSON - no obvious connection to the THOMSONs of recent activity, being of Fife origins) in 1932, and provided death dates, but no places, for William and his wife Agnes Hamilton nee GRIEVE.

Still haven't found their emigration records, but William and Agnes (GRIEVE) STEVENSON were in Geelong by at least 1924.

So, that little mystery is well on the way to being solved, which leaves the fate of William Snr's sister Sarah.....

My main web pages have been updated to include the above in the WIGHT tree (and possibly the RUNCIMAN and FAMILTON ones, depending on how many generations down we've got to by now).

One of the changes is a overdue replacement of my paternal ancestors and siblings chart. I noticed the other day that it still showed my older thoughts on how the Bowden WIGHT tree looked (refered to here).
The other change is to the home page for Big Brother - it now includes a summary of the last 5 posts from this blog - thanks to an update to the program I use to generate the webpages from my TMG database, SecondSite.

13th: Not so Black Friday

It really is the time for the McGREGOR branch of the HENDERSONs to be updated.
Must be something in the air. Three contacts in as many weeks on different twigs of Margaret HENDERSON's descendants.
The latest appears to be a descendant of Charlotte BETT.
In checking where I'd got to for this line, I noticed that William, son of Margaret HENDERSON, who had emigrated to Canada in the 1850s, could probably have more information found for him these days.
And so it proved.
I thought I was merely going to be adding a census or two and ended up finding and documenting a first wife, two children, and some descendants as well. Check out William's updated page. (William, son of William married a Helen DRONE, their dtr Charlotte Jean married a James Elsner CRONIN, but as yet I've not figured out what happened to William's sister Mary, nor Jean's sister Elizabeth Swinton McGREGOR).

In addition to all the above, the RUNCIMAN DNA project has turned up trumps. The preliminary results mentioned back on the 6th did indeed end up being an excellent match at 67 markers as well.
On the strength of that I've updated my RUNCIMAN surname page to include some of the descendants of Thomas and Alison (GRIEVE) RUNCIMAN as well.
By no means all, just some I've documented in passing.

All I need now is for my computer to be fixed! I'm somewhat hampered at the moment as I was silly enough to download a supposedly 'critical' microsoft security patch, KB2286198.
More fool me. My desktop went into a boot loop which I'm still fighting.
There's always a silver lining though, as a result I was forced to resolve a couple of things I'd not bothered about on my laptop, and at the end of the fix, I will end up with a backup server on a spare older slow machine, which task has been on the to-do list for rather too long.

Caithness to New Jersey?; More Ontario FAIRBAIRNs

Where does the time go? Mostly been working on Ontario FAIRBAIRN and related families, in no particular order: GRIEVE, WINDOVER, HUFF, COUGHLIN, HUDSON, RAYCRAFT, ASSELSTINE, FRENCH, FITCHETT, PAGE, VADER.
FAIRBAIRN descendants chart updated.

Sidetracked from FAIRBAIRNs to investigate Livy's theory that her x-greats grandmother Johanna/Jean KERR nee BAIN, d/o of a James and Ellen BAIN, just might be Johanna, d/o James BAIN and Helen ANDREW.
My initial worry was that if the age was right, she had emigrated to America as a 16/17 yr old - but with whom?
However, a 1924 letter from her younger sister Hannah in Wick, written to the American relations, clearly states that the sister didn't remember her as she had left so young, and I quickly found a dth cert of this Hannah, with the right address, that showed we had the right parents. As the letter also mentions Kate, implying she is Johanna and Hannah's sister, I presume Johanna emigrated with her elder sister.
This could well explain how I've not had much joy finding most of the girls in this family after about 1871.

Rootsweb WorldConnect db LornaHenderson updated (prior to this BAIN find). Also updated are the Rootsweb pages (after this BAIN find).

Jul 31, 2008: Found a home for Robert

For better or worse, I've decided that the Robert FAIRBAIRN who emigrated to Ontario who supposedly had children: Elizabeth, Alison, Jane, William, James and Robert, is another son of Archibald FAIRBAIRN and Alison CROSSER.
This is admittedly conjecture, but based on several bits of circumstantial evidence, a lot of which hinges upon Napanee as a place in common.
Would love to hear from anyone who can comment authoritatively either way, especially as I've also decided that the William who married Catherine MORGAN is his son William.
Webpages updated to include identified family to date in the descendants charts, and to give Robert a page of his own to outline some of my reasons.
Related surnames: FITCHETT, GRIEVE, STRAIN, MORGAN, HAYNES, and in the next generations: VADER (no not Darth), FRENCH, GOULD, ROBINSON, VINE, GARRISON, ANDERSON, HEFFERAN, FRISKIN, GILLESPIE, SMITH, PAGE