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Thanks for all this, Aileen! I've got some more bits & bobs too, I'll post them as soon as I can. It is a terrible labyrinth of names around there: I remember when I was doing my first days of research at the Records Office I just gave up on this line in despair at ever sorting them all out!

Does this make sense to you?:

Amelia, also Emily, seems to have been called Bemellie Bell at her birth, her parents being Andrew Dors and Isabelle Liston - Isabelle, I think, remarried to a William Patterson in 1833. Before marrying James Noble, looking at the 1851 census, it seem Amelia might have had an illegitimate son to a Liston Carnie, since a boy of the same name is in residence, as "Grandson".

I'd be interested to know if anyone else is looking into the Carnie, Brand and Noble families in Newhaven and Leith. I'm following back from my grandmother, Emily Dores Carnie Brand, born 1903 in South Leith to James Marr Brand and Emily Dores Carnie. I'm especially curious to discover where the Dores element in the name comes from, since at the moment it hasn't come up anywhere in the tree.

Thanks for sharing all this Dijo!

I wonder if anyone has any ideas for how we can try to identify the first John McK, the subject of my original post.

One unusual thing is that the marriage with Margaret Nairn seems to have been quite a late one for these days, since if her parentage is the one we think it is she was 33 in 1789. Which would also explain why the kids seem to stop in 1800.

I don't remember meeting any of William's brothers, but I used to visit their sister Mary and her husband whenever I was in Edinburgh. She was a lovely woman.