Family Origins Research

A Maryhill Highlander Following on from my A Walk on the Woodside blog, I’d like to focus on my great grandfather who lived his short life of 26 years in Maryhill before the turmoil of the First World War meant he would never return home.  John was born in 1888 in the District of Kelvin in Glasgow at New City Rd. As you’d expect from my comments in my A Walk on the Woodside blog, the tenement building is no longer standing and a flyover and car park takes their place. The 1891 census for the Civil Parish of Barony is the first census return we see John’s name, along with his father James, mother Isabella and younger brother Thomas all residing in Kirkland St. Kirkland St, 1975,  Record # C1855, Virtual Mitchell John’s father James was the son of immigrants John Priestly and Ellen Dickie, both from County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland, who, like so many, travelled to Scotland in the mid-1850s and later to seek a new life in industrial Glasgow.  John an...

 A Walk on the Woodside Gairbraid  St, c.1910.   Record # C1847, Virtual Mitchell Cataloguing my family history research and specific locations for the maternal side of my family who lived in and around the Maryhill area of Glasgow from the early 1870s to the 1960s, I noticed with interest how they tended to remain within this specific area of Glasgow for generations. Places such as Cameron St, Abington St, Doncaster St, Scotia St, New City Rd, Garscube Rd, Windsor St and Maryhill Rd to name a few of the locations within the north of Glasgow were mentioned in the statutory registers, census returns and the valuation rolls of my maternal family through close to 100 years. Multiple generations were born, and some died, often of infant mortality, within the same tenement flat. My grandfather, great grandmother and two great grand aunts were all born and lived at various times in the same flat in Cameron St. The place of birth of multiple siblings can sometimes reveal ...