Jessie Maitland Milne

[rosie17]

Well done William finding them on the Electoral Roll records confirms them living together 

Rosie

[MrsGnomus]

Thanks for all of that.

I can see that he was sent to prison for 2 months in 1909 for threats to kill and assault. He was living in Grimsby then. It also looks like was he enlisted in the Royal Navy by 1896 and was serving in the Merchant Navy in WW1.

If he was working on trawlers in the 1920’s that would certainly explain how they met as she was working as a fish worker in Aberdeen in 1921.

I will see what else I can dig up tomorrow. If can find his service records from WW1 that might also be interesting.

Elisabeth

[rosie17]

Did you get the death certificate for John Binning Douglas to see what it says ?
Going by some of the records if it's the same one I think he was born 1878 Portobello on Scotlandspeople .One of his navel records his birth is down as 1876 Portobello he is on the 1921 census in Grimsby .I don't have a subscription to find my past but these records are free to view 8/11 November .The person that registered the death for Jessie was she known to the family ?.

Rosie

[MrsGnomus]

I have just looked at the digital image of his death on the GRO website.  He died as the result of a stroke while visiting a house in a village between Blackpool and Preston. The owner/occupier of the house was the person who registered the death. 

I have also found at least some of his service records on the National Archive website this morning - he seems to have spent a lot of time in the cells for various misdemeanours. I get the sense that she may well have jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire when she became involved with him.

While I have been researching this morning I also came across some evidence of prison records for her mother - the newspaper access is still free this morning so cross checking that has come up with another record of her father assaulting her mother. I haven't told my husband about that one yet!

I don't know anything about the person who reported Jessie's death other than that they were resident at a different address on the same street but were also present when she died - whoever it was knew enough about her to tell the registrar that she was the widow of my husband's great grandfather. As another twist in the tale I used to drive along that street on a fairly regular basis not long after we got married as it was the route to where I would hold an outpatient clinic when I was a trainee Psychiatrist.

My father in law doesn't seem to know a great deal about his father's family history.  His mother divorced his father in 1956 - I am pretty sure that his drinking was also an issue from what I have been told. He knew that his father had an older sister and a younger brother but had no idea about him being in the Aberdeen Poorhouse at all - I suspect that this was something that would have been regarded as a great source of shame at the time.  His father's younger brother was married to his mother's younger sister (it took me a while to get my head around that one!) but died in 1937, not long after he got married, from TB.

I will definitely be putting in a heavy research session when the records are free to view in November - I did the same last year too. Since then I have found that Lincolnshire Libraries have free access to Find My Past as well as Ancestry.  Residents of Nottinghamshire (that's where we finally ended up with work) can sign up to the Lincolnshire Library service so I have done that too - I just need to find time to go and spend a lengthy session at our closest library.

Thanks for all your help

Elisabeth

[rosie17]

Yes agree there about the person registering the death must have been known to the family with information regarding Charles Milne .
Glad it was the right person they certainly had a troubled life 

Rosie

[Archivos]

That's great to have found her, though sounds it was a tough life for all concerned. Agree about the link with the fishing, people travelled all over following the boats so end up in various places along the way.

Interesting too that her child, Margaret, said Jessie was deceased before she actually was though, according to her marriage certificate.

[MrsGnomus]

I am constantly amazed at how tough it seems to have been and the number of children who died at extremely young ages.

In respect of her being described as deceased when her daughter married I guess it’s possible that her daughter had no idea if she was alive or dead or didn’t want to admit that her mother had left her father to live with someone she wasn’t married to. However I have found other errors on marriage records for ancestors of my husband with at least two records having the wrong name for the mother of the bride and one other record that had someone listed as deceased when other records contradicted that but on the whole they have been accurate and the extra information included in the Scottish records makes researching much easier than the records for the rest of the U.K.

Now that I have an answer about what happened to Jessie I am moving on to try and find out where and when her husband’s father and paternal grandfather died. Similar situation I can trace them from birth, marriage, having children and appearing in census records but then they both vanish from the census records but aren’t recorded as deceased on other records until their wives died with both of them being described as widows at the date of their death. I can’t find any records for either of them dying in Scotland and I can’t find matches for them in the English and Welsh records. They were both masons/stonecutters so it’s possible that they went abroad for work - I will start a separate post about them if I am still stuck after looking at passenger lists and so on.

Elisabeth