Stewart and Douglas Family History

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Well, she was his new wife when this photo was taken 50-odd years ago.

I don’t know who the others in the photo are so my guess is that they are from her side of the family. Neither do I know her maiden name which seems pretty ridiculous as I write this as I’ve known her all my life and seen her many times.

But family history is a bit like that. There’s loads of things that you figure “of course I know that” and never quite get around to writing it down and thereby realising that you really don’t know it at all. Writing it all down is, of course, the key as you’ll have untold numbers of gaps in the information if you don’t write it all down as you come across it.

Whilst it’s pretty unlikely that I would end up following her family line it is much better to have a complete record to play with. For example, it looks from my records as though the Stewart and Hamilton families intermarried a number of times over the generations. Were they distant cousins getting married? Perhaps, perhaps not: I just don’t know at the moment.

The more complete the record is, the more likely you are to find matches when searching in the likes of the Mormon family history site.

Popularity: 54% [?]

Before you go far on the family history front you find yourself wandering around graveyards to pick up bits & pieces of information which is how I found myself in the Lisburn graveyard some years ago.

After a lot of wandering round, I found lots of Stewarts but none seemed to be my great grandparents. However, when it’s a country area like that, it’s usually best to work on the assumption that the older graves with the names you’re looking for are related to you. There may not be an immediately traceable connection but when there are only a handful of Stewarts who’ve died around the appropriate time, chances are that eventually I’ll find the relationship.

Anyway, there weren’t that many of the right vintage. Quite a lot around the latter part of the 1900s but they’d be distant cousins at best as the family moved to Belfast around the turn of the century. However, there was one grave which I was pulled towards, that of William Stewart. It was in the older part of the cemetery with some very old style graves surrounding it and one of very few Commonwealth War Graves headstones in that section.

There was no definite connection at that time as the headstone just didn’t have enough information to let me link him in. However, I did know that there was a brother of my grandfather who’d died in WW1 and William was certainly around the right vintage. Snag was, that I was pretty sure that the family had already moved to Belfast by 1915 so he’d not be buried there, would he? Well, not too long after that I came across the excellent site of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and looked up the Stewart deaths. What did I find, but William and the address where he lived at that time in Belfast.

In fact, Mayo Street where he was living is quite an important area for the Stewarts for a large chunk of the 1900s and knowing that address let me look up even more information in the Public Records Office about various members of the family as they all lived there in various houses from 1906 through to the second world war. Just knowing that address kept me busy for quite a while afterwards.

How come William is buried in Lisburn and not in one of the Somme graveyards? Well, he didn’t make it to the Somme because he died through getting a foot infection during the training in Ballykinler. That actually saved my grandfather as he was able to point to William’s death as evidence that the infection that he’d gotten in his own foot was quite serious and he did make it to the Somme and back home again. What I still have to do sometime is to ask for William’s and my grandfathers service records.

So, if you are exploring graveyards it’s definitely worthwhile noting details of everyone with the family name that you’re looking for if they’re anywhere close to the right vintage.

Popularity: 57% [?]

The earliest photo that I have of my family is this one of the entire Douglas family in 1909.

The Killinchy area remains significant for the family right up to the present day with descendants of the children Agnes, Bobbie and Catherine still living there.

Robert produced the first complication in the family tree in that he remarried after his wife Catherine died in 1921 so there’s a whole new branch of the family (still based in Killinchy) to complicate the drawing of the tree somewhat.

But who’s in the photo?

Well, starting from the left as you are looking at it those standing are Catherine, Samuel, Robert, Robert (Bobbie), and Nannie (Agnes Elizabeth). Sitting are Annie Burton, Catherine and Jeannie.

Annie married Bill Maggs and they both went to Canada a few years after this photo was taken and founded a branch of the family in Alberta and British Colombia. I met her in 1978 whilst on holiday there and found her very like my own grandmother despite all those years of separation (they never got together again after she left). Pretty well all of the descendants of the others still live in Northern Ireland.

Popularity: 55% [?]