Hi Karenlee,
I have been sitting here a while with a pencil and paper trying to make sense of all your hard work.
Mary , the grand daughter in the Howieson household in the 1851 is 9 years old which is making her the oldest candidate for Mary so far I believe (b c1842)!
I can see how all the Howeison's can be tied nicely together and recognize how logically that granddaughter Mary would be Janet Howieson's neice but is not likely to be a Gilchrist. She could be a Howieson by one of the sons or some other name by marriage of one of the daughters.
We know that Janet married Alexander Gilchrist and they had a daughter too called Mary ( presumably Gilchrist) born in Bothwell and age 3 in the 1851 and 13 in the 1861....much closer to the correct age of our Mary but still not right unless you accept my 27+5 theory.
The bad news is that we cannot cinch it by finding grandmother Elizabeth howeison as a widow in the 1871 or 1881 in the Monkland/Baillieston area, which would corroborate Mary's story to the Inspector. The good news is that if our Mary is indeed Janet's daughter, then we have found a lot of relatives on her family tree!
On the death records, my bet would be on the 1922 as we have a record that says she was alive in 1919. Carluke 1930 is geographically too far away to be very credible and with her lifestyle she would have had to be lucky to live that long. PossilPark in 1922 was a pretty mean and poor district of Glasgow. Would a death record in Scotland typically tell us anything which could help us? We already know that it will say 67 years in 1922= born c 1855 which is pretty good. Anything else....kin, birthplace?
At some stage soon I must call it a day and stop depending on your help and good nature. Sometimes things are never meant to be unravelled until their time. Best wishes, Lumber-Jack
I
