apanderson wrote:.....snipped.........The 'lady' (the ancestor, not the Rootchatter!) in question had an illegitimate child and over the space of a couple of months, the story unfolded that she and the accused father, had to appear before the Kirk Session on about three or four separate occasions, were told off and eventually banned from going to Church for six months.
A far from unusual process and timescale.
One just has to wonder on occasion just how many of our ancestors were "windup merchants" and were winding up, and leading on the "Holy Wullies" of the session.
![[5 cups]](./images/smilies/sm-5cups.gif "[5 cups]")
apanderson wrote:I honestly thought I was going to be flung out of the place . . . there I was, sitting giggling in a corner at the 'phrasology' and how seriously the 'sin of fornication' had been taken.
Dearie, dearie me, - Anne, you must really learn to control yourself and behave in an entirely sober (non-incaholic meaning that is) dead pan manner
, - this from someone who was asked by a staff member on the British floor at the Salt Lake City library to try and control my laughter, or at least keep the volume down so that those at the other end of the floor couldn't hear me. I think that I've have probably been asked to leave the Library were it not for the fact that the said staff member knew full well that I was long since advertised as giving a talk the following day to the library "patrons", as they're called, on the subject of ScotlandsPeople
My personal approach to such situations, I can best sum up by saying that I delight in such kirk session minutes situations in going back and re-reading "Holy Wullie's Prayer" as well as the less well known but equally guid "Tae a Loose" (louse) !!
Honestly
, I always do my very best to behave in a sober, quiet and entirely appropriate, quiet and unobtrusive manner when visiting archives and libraries, but there are times, like Anne, when I just have to burst out laughing at the antics of our ancestors, or groan in deep sympathy when the cause of death is revealed
My all time favourite such situation relates to when the 1901 census became available at NRH..........
Some years previously I'd been "gap-filling" and encountered major problems in locating the death register entry for my eponymous great grandfather John.
Up until 1899 he, wife and one or two wains appear in the Montrose Year Books, but, thereafter, his wife appears at the same address as "Widow". (OK, OK, I know that there's no absolute proof that this involved the same Jane WEBSTER, however unlikely that someone of the same name would have come to live at the exact same address, but then there's some coincidences verging on the unbelievable that I could tell you about
)
Obvious, then, that John died prior to 1899 surely? Not in terms of any record that I could find
, even in England, and I spent a good few £6.50s on possible records, as I was utterly determined to find the record ............. (I'm like that
)
It was the type of situation where, although the record is not vital to the tree, I was still determined to find it ....... but only on the basis that you spend some effort now and then on the search, but otherwise concentrate on research for more productive lines.
Eventually I challenged the assumption that the man was deid in 1899 and started looking in later years, and widening the area, and, fairly quickly found that he'd died in 1909 in hospital in Dundee, of "cirrhosis of the liver", "usual residence" the address of someone who turned out to be his nephew. And be aware, please, guid folk, that this cause of death did not always automatically indicate or prove over indulgence in the consumption of spirituous liquors
(Thinks, - I've got another ancestor, also a great-grandfather, who buttled for the nobility and died in his late 40s of cirrhosis of the liver, - so am I doomed by my genes
![[cheers]](./images/smilies/cheers.gif "Cheers")
)
All this was before the release date of the 1901 census.
When that was released, and after other more urgent families had been followed up, my thoughts returned to ggrandfather John, known to have still been alive in 1901, despite the Montrose Year Books entries showing his wife as a widow in 1899 and later ............
This is the point where I have to confess that I metaphorically had to be picked off the floor at NRH, as I was quite helpless with laughter ........
In the 1901 census, my ggrandfather John WEBSTER is shown as living about 2 streets away in Montrose from his wife, as a lodger, - the only lodger BTW, - in the house of a like aged widow ..........
OK, please, please, calm down out there, as there could have been some entirely innocent explanation (couldn't there
) for such a situation, - and, unfortunately, nothing at all that could help my situation has come down the generations, - it doesn't help that I was the youngest son of a second marriage and that my father died when I was 12, - but I know what I
think happened here
............
David
