Stewart and Douglas Family History

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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.

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It seems appropriate that I start this family history blog with the oldest confirmed relative that I have.

Family history is something of a now and again task for me in that I’ll sometimes find a real mine of information about one strand of relatives and spend months working on it which are followed by a gap of several years before the next piece of the puzzle turns up. Or, to put it another way, there will probably be gaps in the postings that appear here (my aim is a minimum of once a month but more than likely once a week to begin with).

Although the domain name might imply that I’ll only be looking into the Stewarts I’ll certainly be looking for Douglas’ too and will be adding in more names as I go along.

But what about Andrew?

Well, he is the very first entry in the family bible that his son William started back in the 1800s. That bible is quite a rich source of information covering the period from 1805 through to the early 1900s to which I have added information about the majority of his descendants over the years. I’ll be touching on some of those in the coming months in the hope that some people out there will be able to fill in some of the gaps that I have and hopefully I’ll be able to fill in some of the gaps in their family trees. This’ll take us from Northern Ireland, probably to Scotland (though funnily enough, I’ve no relatives listed there), definitely to Canada and both the east and west coast of America.

Unfortunately, the bible limits the information, for the most part, to names, dates of birth, marriages, and (for the older entries) dates of death. There is little or no information about locations of any of these events. Not to worry though as the dates give us enough information to find out other things as you’ll see in the entries to come.

The Mormon records indicate that Andrew was born in Ballymoney in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. However, that information comes from an unknown relative who converted to the Mormon faith at some point and it is not reliable. I know that because I have gone to some of the registry offices in the locations mentioned in the Mormon record to get copies of the original documents and there is no record of the people mentioned. Furthermore, other relatives have indicated that the family moved to Northern Ireland in the 1800s yet there are no locations in the Mormon record for Scotland. So, in due course, I will be working backwards through the records starting from known information (more anon about this).

Anyway, that’s the first of my messages in a bottle.

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