Mary Kidd

Mary Kidd is in my family tree as the maternal grandmother of  Allan Old the miner.  She had Allan's mother, Mary Finlayson, illegitimately but settled down to a normal family life with John Finlayson and had a further five children although, significantly, there were six years between Mary and the next child, David.  Remarkably she seems to have spent all of her 63 years in West Mill, a part of Lasswade, and given the lack of any other place names, apart from an unexplained Fountain in 1861 (there was a Fountainbank in Cockpen but I can't locate it), there is every chance that this was in cottages attached to the works.  The papermill was the centre of life there down by the river and if you were employed there it would make sense to live there as well.  I don't know if the housing was provided by the employer as was a trend in Victorian mills but there was a tendency to tie the workers to the company in this way.

Mary was born to James Kidd and Janet Bruce and it was easy enough to locate a local couple fitting the bill.  But it was wrong!  Neatly illustrating the rule that all assuptions must be rigorously checked, I noticed that Janet would have been 15 at the birth of her child.  Now that isn't impossible, as we know, but I subsequently found that the couple had had another child four years previously so James Kidd born 1799 and Janet Bruce born 1799, both locally, are not our couple.  The next stage illustrates the detective work needed at times to find the relevant records.

To cut a long story short, I found the only other Mr Kidd producing children in the area around the same time was an Alexander Kidd who was born in Carriden, near Bo'ness, before having his family around Lasswade.  It turns out he had a brother James, also born in Carriden, who would be an appropriate age to have had the children noted above.  A search for a Janet Bruce in the Carriden area found one in Bo'ness born the same year as James.  It's not a certainty but it certainly looks right.  Just as possible corroboration, in the 1841 census in Lasswade there is a James Kidd in his eighties born outside the census county with an Isabella who is over 65.  James and Alexander had a big sister Isabel born in Carriden who would be 70.  The assumption is that the whole family could have moved across.

I have what I consider a tree from this point back but as it's only a list of names and dates there's not much of interest.