Hello Charles. Briefly, I've traced our MYLES line back to
Robert MYLES and Marjorie TOD who were married in Largo parish in 1752. Robert may have been from the Largo/Newburn area, where his surname was common. Marjorie was the daughter of Samuel TOD, mason, and Jean INNES of Anstruther, and both her father and her mother came from old Anstruther families. Robert and Marjorie were married at Largo by the minister of Anstruther, Mr. Nairne, and a bit later they moved to Anstruther where their son
William MYLES was born in 1771. In 1795 William married Janet BLACK at Innergellie, Kilrenny, where he was a labourer. Nowadays Innergellie is just a big old house with some land around it, but there used to be a little village there within the larger village of Kilrenny.
William and Janet married during the Napoleonic Wars, and William became a soldier in the Dumfriesshire Militia, who were stationed in Fife at the time. I think they were a bit like a Home Guard, and he would have got a bit of a wage and a uniform but not have had to actually go abroad and fight. Over the next few years Wm. and Janet had several children who are registered in the old parish registers of Carnbee parish, just inland from Anstruther. They moved around various farms in the area before settling in Crail, where they were both buried in the churchyard. No headstone, but I have a copy of the burial entries from the sexton's burial book.
Janet BLACK survived through to the Crail census of 1851 in which she gave her parish of birth as Carnbee. BLACK was a common name in that parish, but I haven't been able to pinpoint her parents.
During the hard years after the end of the war (1815+), there was great unemployment and near-famine conditions up and down the land, and most of Wm. and Janet's children died. One who survived was
James MYLES, who was born in 1799 at Newbigging farm in St. Andrews parish. In 1821 James MYLES, who was a coal-miner, married Betsy BURNS at Crail. Betsy was one of two illegitimate children born in St. Andrews to John BURNS, sievewright or "riddle-maker" (a specialised form of joinery) by his servant Christian BROWN, who may have been a Crail woman, I'm not sure. The BURNS family had been sievewrights in St. Andrews for generations. I know a lot about them as John's father James BURNS went bankrupt and I have photocopies of the bankruptcy proceedings from the Sheriff Court Records in the National Archives of Scotland, West Register House.
James BURNS died young, at 29, whether from an accident down the pit or disease, I don't know. His and Betsy's daughter
Marjorie MYLES, born 1825, bore two illegitimate children called James and Helen PEEBLES in 1853 and 1855 respectively. The father is named in the Crail kirk-session records as "James PEEBLES, farm-labourer". I have worked out that he must have been the James born in Kilrenny parish in 1827, I think (haven't got my notes handy) to Robert PEEBLES and Ann DEWAR.
James never married Marjorie MYLES or anybody else. In 1855, the year in which his 2nd illegitimate child was born, he skedaddled to the other side of the world (Tasmania) with his younger brother Robert on the emigrant ship Commodore Perry, and never came back. I got all this from descendants of his brother Robert in Australia whom I "met" on another internet forum.
Of the children he left behind (and weren't the PEEBLES descendants in Australia gobsmacked when I told them this!), James PEEBLES married Margaret SPINK, whose parents had moved to Crail from Auchmithie, near Arbroath. James and Margaret were my great-grandparents.
Helen PEEBLES never married, but in 1881 she had an illegitimate daughter called Madeline Wilson PEEBLES. In 1913 Madeline married Alexander ANDERSON of Anstruther.
I have to laugh when I look back at what I've written and see that I was going to be "brief". But there was a lot to tell.
I'd be interested to correspond with you and swap more information, either here, or, to avoid boring other members of this forum, privately.
Harry
