Jane Roger

She is Jane in five records and Jean in five records and she is Roger in some and Rodger in others but is clearly the same person in all of them.  Her death record is a mixed bag in that it correctly identifies her father as Peter Rodger but it wrongly notes her mother as Mary Pow.  In all the censuses in her married life she tells us she was born in Prestonpans and with her recorded age (apart from one rogue entry) we know we are looking for a birth around 1822.  The birth to Peter Roger and Mary Kelly is found in 1820.  Their marriage in 1810 is interesting - "Canongate -  Peter Rodger Edinr Militia Castels and Mary Kellie Daughter of John Kellie Labourer Cockcary? Gave up their Names for Marriage Nt Taylor Horse Wynd Robert Turphey Brewer Servant Ditto", which tells us that he was in the Edinburgh Militia, a sort of Territorial Army of the time.  He would have been trained up and given pay and a financial retainer which some agricultural labourers saw as a sort of paid holiday.  A bounty would have been offered at the end of the training to encourage him to enlist in the regular army.  However he didn't and was adding to his family in 1815 rather than fighting at Waterloo.

Mary Kelly seemed to have children at closer intervals than other women at the time and rather than the standard predictable two years between births, hers were usually 18 months or less.  I think I have located Peter Roger's birth with good parents' names in 1786 in Duddingston and there is a birth of a Mary Kellie in Prestonpans in 1785 but the parents' names don't feature in Peter's and Mary's family so I'm not keen to count that one in.

When Jane was 20 she was in Prestonpans with her father but no mother.  However, the 1841 census didn't have confirmation if he was a widower or not.  It did however say that he was born outside the census county of East Lothian supporting my assertion that he was from Midlothian. 

She married Walter Beaton in 1843 and in 1851 had children aged from 10 and 8 downwards, suggesting that one child was borderline and one definitely illegitimate.  They were both born in Prestonpans but subsequent children were born in Kilmarnock in Ayrshire.  The rest of her story is shared with Walter Beaton until we come to her death.  The original cause of death was given as liver poisoning but a corrected entry stated that it was bronchitis and heart disease hastened by an overdose of opium.  It's difficult to say whether the opium would have been prescribed by a doctor as it wasn't actually illegal at that point, although its addictive properties were known, but when you consider that both morphine and codiene are produced from it you can see how its use as a pain-killer could be appreciated.  It does affect the liver though and the overdose could be the result of a single event or long-term use

I stated earlier on this page about a rogue entry in the censuses.  In 1881, Walter and Jane had aged only 3 years from the previous one where, even then, I thought they were "rounding down".