The Renshaws

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.

William was born around 1930 and as Jim relates he had been previously married to Elizabeth Anne Hall in Spalding, Lincolnshire. I knew worked as a travelling salesman of silk – a ‘hawker’ – and so with Margaret, who he married in 1874 had moved around a lot.

Each child born in another town and as Jim notes, at least one of
their first two children ,James Henry, appears to have been left in Smyllum Orphanage,
Lanark. The 1881 census shows he and his wife as lodgers in Newstead, Melrose but without any mention of children. Yet by then, with the help of Jim, I now know they had had three.

The third was my great grandmother Mary Ellen, born in Scotland. The fourth Thomas was born in Wales and the fifth Catherine Penrith born in Penrith, England. It is only in the 1891 census that these three appear with thier parents living at Cowgate in Edinburgh.

Margaret McVeigh's Certificate of Baptism

Their life appears not to have been at all easy as they lived their last years in poorhouse in Colinton, Edinburgh. Wiliam died in 1905 but of Margaret there is no record. What I do have is her certificate of baptism in 1844 extracted in 1927. Whether there is an event around then that required her certificate may be a new line of enquiry.

Jim’s research on his Renshaw line is detailed and has many interesting annotations. It also covers at a lesser extent the other side of my mother’s family from her grandfather James Scott who marrried Mary Ellen. When I have read through all this over the holidays I will write on what I have learnt.

Lesson for today:
Before starting to thrash around in all that costly online research mire type “surname surname name” and Google it.