John Anderson 1834

John Anderson was an Irishman.  Or was he?  In all of the censuses he was recorded as being born in Ireland, all apart from one that is, one which gives him as born in Maxwelltown, a part of Dumfries which is over the river and in another county.  I considered this an error but thought it worth keeping in mind.  It was indeed an error but gave a little piece of valuable information.

John had come over from Ireland and married a local lass, Isabella Hunter, in Musselburgh.  John is listed as a blacksmith and the witnesses to the marriage were both Hunters, suggesting that John had no relatives nearby.  Seven years later he was with his wife and three children in one of the Leith closes and by then he was a Ship Porter.  He then went on a wander through Tranent, Kirkcaldy, Bo'ness and Leith in consecutive censuses.  He was simply a labourer in all of these reports, though specifically a harbour labourer in Kirkcaldy, and he had lost his wife when she was only 43 to a wasting disease, probably tuberculosis.  At that point he had young children, as young as 4, but he had daughters of 16 and 14 so young Thomas would have had surrogate mothers to help him develop.  By 1901 they had all gone, even Thomas, and John was staying in a lodging home in Leith, one of seven Irish and English boarders.  Four years later he died in the North Leith Poorhouse, a sad end.

However, the death record confirmed what I'd deduced already, that his parents were Henry Anderson and Ellen Carnie.  Yes, his eldest son was Henry Anderson and his second daughter was Ellen Carnie Anderson, which allowed us to guess his parentage and according to the Mormon website there was a marriage between a Henry Anderson and an Ellen Carnie in Ireland just at the right time.  Being an Irish record means there is not much opportunity to refer to it.

An amount of detective work followed and is explained in more detail in his father Henry's page but it allowed me to find that the family had in fact lived in the aforementioned Maxwelltown when they arrived from Ireland and his parents had followed him up to Leith and lived next door to him in Bennie's (or Binnie's) Close.  It also revealed that John had been a Pedlar in Maxwelltown.  His parents' lodging house was full of hawkers and pedlars and the difference is that hawkers have a horse and cart while pedlars sell on foot, both going door-to-door.

To answer the original question, yes, he was an Irishman.