Elder Samuel

Elder Samuel is a strange name.  So strange that she is noted as a boy in her christening record.  She married a man with an equally unusual name, Honeyman Old, thereby becoming Elder Old, surely one of the strangest names ever. Elder is a fairly common local surname and appears in the local records around the time of her birth so perhaps this is the source of the name but we can't be certain. We know she had elder sisters Jean, Margaret and Hellan so maybe her parents had run out of family names to use and named her after a family friend.

She was born in Corstorphine but it's unclear whether that would be in the village or in the landward part of the parish.  I favour the latter as her christening was witnessed by Frances Mitchell and there is a good chance that this Mitchell would be of the same family as were witnesses at her father John's christening, namely David and John Mitchel's (that apostrophe looks wrong but is there to suggest that they were both Mitchel but not named Mitchels).  Her grandfather, another John, was noted as being a servant to John Mitchel in Broomhouse which was a local farm located where the Forrester High School was initially built.

It came as a surprise to me that having moved into Corstorphine myself I was walking in the footsteps of one of my most important ancestors, the mother of all the Lothian Olds.  A look at the local church graveyard reveals a number of Samuels who were presumably related to us as her father and other Samuels were masons.  Elder moved to Leith at some point before 1799 as she married Honeyman there and all her children were born there.  She lived to a good age for the time, 82, although she was a pauper by the time of the 1851 census.

There was an interesting encounter in the Edinburgh Central Library one evening when I wanted to consult a microfiche which someone else had booked out.  The researcher asked me what name I was looking for so that he could give me the appropriate resource and it turned out that we were both looking for Samuels in Corstorphine.  The man himself was a Samuel and we were actually related, a long way back in the mid 1700s admittedly.