The Colorful Ones

I love a good skeleton in the closet. Bring me tales of your scandalous, your salacious and your ne’er do well and I’ll be transfixed. I want to hear all about that bigamist, the eccentric uncle or unknown love child. Whatever it is about these colourful relatives, but I am absolutely fascinated by the process of uncovering the details of their often secret lives, and following the trail, papered in records, newspapers and old letters, that they never knew they were leaving.

Great Granny was a bit of a family black sheep. Born in 1887 to a farming family in the western highlands of Scotland, at the age of 21 Annie found herself the unwed mother of a baby daughter. ¹ In 1908, the social mores of the time in that area frowned upon so called illegitimate births and treated both the mother and the child with disdain.

My great grandmother ventured southward to the city of Greenock to find work, as her 1912 marriage record ² shows. I hope she married for love, but Annie was expecting a second child, and as an unmarried domestic servant, had very little choice. Annie and her new husband, Duncan, arrived in Canada in June 1913, a fact that is confirmed by online passenger records ³. With them, was a 3 month old daughter, Mary.

Family oral history told me that the small family settled in rural Ontario and that their happiness in the new country was short lived. Duncan, for never revealed reasons, left Annie and Mary and returned to Scotland. Never one to let grass grow under her feet, Annie picked herself up and obtained employment in her usual occupation, housekeeping. She kept house for John Killin, a bachelor farmer who had inherited quite a bit of property from his Irish immigrant ancestors. It wasn’t long before Annie married John, despite their 22 year age difference, and despite the fact that she was already married!

On Annie and John’s 1917 marriage registration ⁴, it clearly states that Annie was a widow. The only problem with that is that her first husband, Duncan, lived on for another 50 years. Oh how I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Duncan’s lawyers contacted Annie in Canada while Duncan was attempting to obtain a legal divorce in order to remarry! By that time, Annie and John had been married over 20 years.

For more than a decade, up until near the 100^th anniversary of Annie’s departure from Scotland, I was on a mission to find out what became of my intriguing great grandmother. I had only a bits and pieces of her Canadian life story which tantalized me terribly as I am the granddaughter of the child born to Annie in 1908 and left behind in Scotland. My own family immigrated to Canada in 1967 but sadly never had any contact with her. Annie’s Australian brother-in-law referred to her as the “shady lady”, which more or less summed up her family’s attitude towards her and largely led to her isolation.  I imagined her to be a sad and forgotten figure.

As is often the case with missing female relatives, I lacked the one piece of information that would unlock the doors to the story – her married name. My break came in the way of an archived newspaper ad. ⁵ One last message on an often used genealogy message board ⁶ was finally seen by the right person – either that or the information had been recently added. There it was, in black and white, the obituary of Annie’s daughter, Mary, who had passed away at 23 while expecting a child, and there was Annie’s last surname.

Annie was definitely the most colorful member of her family, a free spirited puzzle of a woman, caring little for societal rules, cutting ties and bucking trends to achieve what she wanted, something nearly unheard of in her day. She weathered separation, rejection, loss and tragedy during the life that eventually spanned 91 years, but Annie was not the lonely soul that I envisioned her to be. In time, I met her great grandsons, and learned she had created a small but loving new family in this land. They remember her today as a wonderful and definitely different sort of lady who told tales of dancing in a Scottish castle and loved a bit of whisky.