Articles

I am looking for evidence in Glasgow or Kilmarnock of perhaps a newspaper article or advertisement of an agent advertising for iron workers to come to Australia. Can any of your members recall seeing such an advert, or have they any suggestions?

Glasgow’s smallpox outbreak started in April 1950. An Indian seaman, Mussa Ali, had left his ship, the SS Chitral, at Tilbury and travelled to Glasgow. There he fell ill and was admitted to hospital with what turned out to be smallpox, endemic in his country of origin.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the growing industrialisation of the spinning and weaving trades resulted in high unemployment, particularly in Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire. The government saw emigration as the solution, and offered assisted passages to Canada in 1820-1821. Emigration Societies were set up, and the first group arrived in 1820.

Although the photos in this album were unnamed, its owner had glued press cuttings of assorted family notices inside the covers – births and marriages at the front, deaths at the back. Unfortunately, they were undated – just a lot of ‘inst.’s and ‘ult.’s relating to the date of publication of the newspaper. Several names […]

When album owners put together their photograph collection, they frequently concluded that their audience was familiar with the people in the pictures. Annotation was kept for friends and relatives abroad, with whom the family might be unfamiliar.

This was my first photo-sleuth project – a collection of over one hundred glass negatives, bought in 1998 at auction in Ayr, showing a beautiful Georgian house in the country

The album was an unassuming green cloth-bound book picked up at an antique fair. I should never have bought it since, at first sight, there were no clues to the previous owner’s identity. But the photos were wonderful – a clearly wealthy Edwardian family, shown posing in sunny gardens, elegant domestic interiors and in front […]

“To Miss E McLymont from her affectionate friend Jessie Malcolm March 26 1863” Cartes de visite were introduced into Britain in 1857 and rapidly became a national craze. People collected portraits of royalty, politicians, friends and family, and mounted them in photograph albums. This collection, presented by Jessie Malcolm to her friend Elizabeth McClymont, is […]

The lands of Meikle Earnock were acquired by the Strang family around 1654. In 1731 and perhaps as a reaction to the Duke’s having flattened the old parish church and disturbed the sleepers in the graveyard, James Strang, ‘Laird of Meikle Earnock’, enclosed an area of ground as a burial ground for his family and the feuars of the village.

With a little practice, the family historian can become adept at ‘reading’ old photos and may even be able to identify previously unidentified ancestors in the family album.