The Old Family
and how we got here
Catherine Kelly, was born in Broxburn of Irish Immigrant parents, one of many Irish families who followed the major engineering works in Victorian Scotland which required cheap muscle. Her birth registration saw her father sign with an x at a time when all Scottish children had been schooled (although it only became legally compulsory for all up to the age of 13 in 1872). The family had come over in 1864 or 1865 which meant it wasn't as a direct result of the potato famine of 1845 to 1852 but Ireland was an impoverished land and many moved to Britain to work in the labour-intensive industries such as construction and mining which needed masses of men who would work for low wages. Her father was a labourer in an oilworks in West Lothian at the time of his death in 1882, which probably meant he was involved in the retort works which extracted the oil from the shale mined locally. There is a good website explaining this important industry, the world's first oil extraction on an industrial scale.
There is a bit of a mystery surrounding Catherine's whereabouts for a while. We know she was in Bathgate at age 11 in 1881 but she isn't with the family in 1891 and we only have any certainty about her at her daughter's birth in 1897 in Linlithgow. The family was in Philpstoun, which wasn't far away from her home in Linlithgow, so it suggests that she had been there when they moved on from Bathgate but as there were no more children born in that time there is no trace of their movements in that ten year period. She would have been 21 in that census so most likely away from home and probably working as a servant somewhere like a huge number of young women in that age. By 1901 she had an illegitimate daughter and was living with her sister. I explained on her daughter's page that I suspect that Catherine was a partner of the Owen Harley she was co-boarding with but there is no certainty that he was the father of her child, albeit the prime suspect.
She did regain respectability though and married James Connor, a miner, and had a further three daughters with him but sadly he was killed in an accident involving a runaway truck at the shale mines.
In the 1901 census her occupation was given as a farm servant, whereas at the birth of her daughter four years earlier she was a domestic servant. Was she a domestic servant in a farmhouse or did she give up the indoor work for fresh air? In the 1911 census, in common with many women in some of the censuses, she had shed a few years!
I also believe that she had a reputation for being a bit of a character, being pretty strong-willed and moving the girls from one church to another as she fell out with the priest or minister, having started out as a Roman Catholic, in common with most, but not all, of the Irish immigrant community. The Andersons, the family her daughter was to marry into, were Protestant Irish immigrants.