I had started rummaging around various sites to build up the information on my mother’s side. I was struggling to ‘get across the border’ to my great great grandfather William Renshaw and was getting grumpy with the lack of online certificates for England. So I bashed “surname william renshaw mcveigh” in Google and foruitously came across the amazing family tree of Jim Renshaw.
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On the certificates of my great, great grandmother Margaret Gilbertson her parents are listed as John Gregor Gilbertson, a shoemaker born in Shetland, and Catherine Ross. Although this family is easy to follow through the censuses, going further back has presented some difficulties.
Researching my great grandfather Alexander Gilbertson did not give any leads on his father but it did for his mother. His birth certificate was not on ScotlandsPeople.com but his marriage and death certificates were. Respectively, they give her as “Margaret Fea, formerly Gilbertson, nee Gilbertson” and “Margaret Gilbertson, previously Fea, nee Gilbertson”. On the same website I looked into this discrepancy and began to piece together a picture of her life.
Gilbertson is my mother’s maiden name and as she had given me copies of various original certificates she had inherited I started to research her side of the family by tracing the Gilbertsons. I was able to quickly go back to my great-grandfather Alexander Gilbertson, a warehouseman or dock checker, as he appears on the births, marriage and death certificates of his son, my grandfather Alexander. I also have a rememberance card from his own burial service and details of the family lair at Seafield Cemetery, Edinburgh. He died aged 40 at 24 Burlington Street, Leith on the 14th September 1916 and was buried on 16th. To go further back I then started looking at ScotlandsPeople.com for his birth and marriage certificates and in Census returns.