Jane Cooper

She is another of those who were registered as Jane but used Jean in real life or at least the censuses suggest that.  Her surname is even more variable and she was Cooper, Couper and Cowper in the records, settling on Cooper on the last one, her death certificate so that's the one I've used.  Her father tended towards Cooper as time went on with a rogue Coupar in 1891.  It seems a bit strange to me that they can be interchangable as Cowper is supposedly pronounced as in the English Cow and Cooper as in the Scottish Coo.  Maybe it depends on how posh you wanted to sound.  Couper I can see being pronounced either way.

Jane's birth is not found bit it isn't too much of a problem as we know her parentage from other records and we can estimate her birth date from censuses.  There is one in Ratho which could be hers but it seems about three years too early so could be a deceased sister.  Re-use of names was common in those days as naming them after grandparents meant that someone could feel "left out" so the next one would fill that gap.  It seems insensitive to our eyes but infant mortality was common and people were used to dealing with it.

There is a little bit of mystery regarding her mother's surname though.  It could have been Miller/Millar or Stobie/Stobo and that is dealt with on her mother's page.  That doesn't help when searching for records. 

She was born in Ratho to a farming family and her father was a farm overseer or grieve by the time she was married.  This presumably would give them a bit more comfort in their lives than the ordinary farm worker's family.  Her mother was the daughter of a veterinary surgeon so there's every reason to believe there was a bit of class about the family as well.

The first census she appears in is at Norton in Ratho, which could be any one of four different farms or houses in the area just west of Gogar.  Next there is a surprising move to the Mull of Kintyre to a wee place called Glencreggan, level with but on the opposite side of the Mull from Carradale.  There is no obvious family connection in the area that I'm aware of and again, in her death record, she is found in Aberdeen, this time with relatives, but it made the task of locating the records more difficult when the initial instinct is to search the areas where they were known to have been for the bulk of their time.

She was back in Ratho in 1858 where she married James Binnie and they moved around a bit in the local area, from Roddinglaw near Hermiston Gait to East Calder to Currie then back to square one at Gogar Stone, right beside her birth place.  The next move was to the West End of Edinburgh, down in the Dean Village and up in Belford Road where her youngest son opened a grocery, which her youngest daughter also served in.  Husband James was a gardener by now and my guess is that it was in one of the big institutions in that area, mainly private schools.  However, by 1911 she was living alone in a house on a farm in modern-day Sighthill before the move to Birse in Aberdeen.  All this movement is difficult to explain but the records have cross-checks to ensure that we are looking at the same Jane Cooper.