When I first started looking into my genealogy on familysearch, I was at first pleased, and then suspicious, to discover a line of descent that traced back to such famous Scottish rulers as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, along with other Scottish and Pictish kings going back a thousand years or more. How, I wondered, did all these fancy people end up in my family tree, when I knew that my father’s side of the family (which this was) were so blue-collar that they practically didn’t have collars at all? His father, who drove a train, had one of the more skilled and prestigious jobs in that whole side of the family. My father himself, partly through his service in World War II, was able to attend university, earned a Master’s degree in history, spent 30 years as a head of department at the prestigious Auckland Grammar School, and was well known in his lifetime as a successful sports historian. But his ancestors were a distinctly working-class lot.
Well, mystery solved, I think. The connection to all the earls and lairds and kings and what-have-you is all through one woman, Helen Ralston (1796-1867), who married a substantial farmer named Duncan McGeachy in 1817. She was still running the farm as at the 1861 census, the census-taker noting, “Farmer 200 Ac[res] Emp[loying] 2 Men”. (Was Duncan still alive? His record on familysearch says he died in either 1900 (unlikely, as he would have been 103, but not impossible in my long-lived family) or 1890, but he isn’t on the 1861 census record, and I can’t see any source documentation for either death date. Official records for this area seem a bit thin on the ground in general.)
Helen’s daughter Barbara (1840-1921), the last of nine children, born when her mother was already over 40, married my great-great-grandfather Colin McMillan (1833-1938) on 26 April 1859, when she was about 19 and he was just short of 26. His occupation is given on the marriage record as “farm servant”.
But the key thing is this: their eldest child, Helen (named, one assumes, after her grandmother), was born on 2 May 1859. That’s just one week after the wedding.
That, friends, was a shotgun wedding. My dodgy ancestor had knocked up the boss’s daughter – or the neighbour’s daughter, possibly; I’ve seen no direct evidence that he worked for the McGeachys, and the most likely source of that evidence, the 1851 census, for some reason doesn’t have the McGeachys in it at all. They’re there in 1841 and 1861, just not 1851. Perhaps the data hasn’t been transcribed, or there’s been an error.
What’s more, this was a shotgun wedding at very close to the last minute, suggesting that there was considerable resistance to it happening at all.
The following year, 1860, Barbara McMillan and an “infant” are on the passenger list of an immigrant ship, the (ironically named, in the circumstances) Northern Bride, sailing from Liverpool (departing 14 June) to Auckland (arriving 11 October). Colin McMillan is not on that list. Either he was omitted in error, or he joined her soon afterwards, because their next child, Robert, was born in August 1861. My great-grandfather, Neil Archibald McMillan, followed in 1863, and lived to be 100. They had 12 children in all.
From these bare and official facts, we can infer youthful foolishness, seduction across class lines, scandal, family arguments, and the couple, not feeling welcome in the town where they had grown up, deciding (or being encouraged by her family to decide) to emigrate to a place where nobody knew them and make a fresh start.
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
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