Articles

Evidence of a genetically inherited disease in the Armours of the west of Scotland

This is the story of Adam McLeod Walton, born on 6 June 1898 in Bridge of Weir who died on 22 August 1917 at Ypres, Western Belgium. That is the name which appears on his birth certificate, the 1911 census, his military service record and the Commonwealth War Grave Commission site. On the village cenotaph, […]

The jail was in the heart of the city less than 800 metres from the City Chambers. It received its first inmates in 1798 and was in constant use until its closure in 1955. One of eight prisons in and around the city during the period, it held both male and female prisoners until the opening of Barlinnie Prison in 1882, after which it functioned as a women’s prison.

One hundred and twelve years ago the ‘Watson Street Fire’ occurred in Glasgow. A booklet tells the harrowing story of the fire in a model lodging house which resulted in the deaths of thirty nine men and twenty four others seriously injured. More than three hundred men escaped with their lives.

Programme of Meetings for 2019-2020

The day before Christmas Eve 1831 was one set to go down in history as the day the Second Cholera Pandemic first and fatally touched Scotland.  In Victorian Scotland, cholera was a frightening and little-understood killer. Only three years after the beginning of the worldwide pandemic, the bacterial disease – spread via infected water supplies – […]

I then found the entry for what appeared to be a Magdalene Institution in the 1861 census for Shettleston, Glasgow, helped by a handwritten note on a microfilm box in the Mitchell Library. The use of the building as an institution caring for penitents was combined with use as a Reformatory.

The Lock Hospital was founded for the care and treatment of women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. What follows is a collection of abstractions from the Glasgow censuses from 1841 to 1911, showing the staff and patients in a snapshot of one night every ten years over seven decades

Never ignore or dismiss ‘cause of death’ on certificates, it can indicate a lot more to investigate. Occasionally it can be quite chilling – on convicted murderer Peter Manuel’s death cert for example, a prison officer notified the death and cause was given as ‘judicial hanging.’