General Chat

Another interesting thing is re David Turnbull the shipwright & his wife Isabella Stewart. They did travel a bit:

Most of their children were born in Dundee:
William 1825, died sometime, young;
David 1826 (the fellow who married Frances Middelton),
John (I lost track of after 1851)
Janet abt 1829, I guess she died, or married young, but I lost track of her
Helen, later known as Ellen, 1835, married Thomas Miller in Northumberland
George born 1839 in Dundee.

In 1841, they're ALL in Nonthumberland for the census.

Then William, namesake of his 1925 deceased brother, was born in 1845ish in Edinburgh- I've forgotten the address, but he died there aged 17 months.
the Isabel was born there in 1849, the same year David the oldest son was married in Northumberland.
Then they were all at the same address in the 1851 census- in Edinburgh- except for David 1826 who was now married, and staying with his parents-in-law the Middletons at Shinrone. (It must be a census error- he's a son-in-law, not a son of Henry Middleton.)

IN 1861, the Turnbull lot- those who're still single- the youngest, George & Isabel, with their widowed father David 1904 the shipwright, , were living in Jarrow, Co Durham, near Newcastle & next door to daughter/sister Ellen Miller nee Turnbull.

Also interesting is David 1826 & Frances Middleton who both changed to become Stewarts by the 1861 census, had their oldest daughter Frances Ann, born in Cuba, West Indies 1853, listed as living with THEM, and she's ALSO listed as living with Frances' parents, Henry & Mary Ann Middleton that same night. Both censuses say she was born in Cuba. One I read somewhere (might have been 1881 after she married, ) said she was born in West Indies BS, which I worked out after many years of thinking that it was Barbados, simply meant "British Subject".

...................

So, I also wonder why David Turnbull, the shipwright, who died in 1864 of the DTs, turned to alcoholism, and why he was not buried with his wife & grandchidren. He was apparently buried alone in Jesmond. The grave was moved about 15 (?) years ago with a lot of others to make room for a freeway. I do not know the inscription. I do have his death certificace though.

His oldest son David the inventor etc changed his surname to Stewart circa 1858.
HIs other children added Stewart as a second name circa 1858, but they remained surnamed Turnbulls.

The oldest son David, did keep Turnbull as a second name in many instances-at least in the baptism registries of his younger three children in 1860, 62 & 64.

HIs two oldest sons changed their surname to Middleton-Stewart. in the 1880s in India.

Frances Ann, the daughter born in Cuba, on her wedding cert in 1876 in UK, lists her name as Frances Ann Turnbull-Stewart, and one of the witnesses is her brother John (1855)- who signs as John William Turnbull-Stewart (also with a hyphen). So he's still sticking to Turnbull for a bit, before he became Middleton-Stewart 10 years later.

There are clearly two generations who've suddenly decided to adhere Stewart to their names somehow, following about 1858.

Hence my idea about the Jacobites, and them havinbg been Stewarts to start with, and changing, then changing back say 100 years later.

I 'm inclined to think that the Stewart from Isabella Stewart, their mother & grandmother, born in Alyth in 1801, is a bit of a red herring, or a confusing coincidence of name, rather than a reson for it.

I may be wrong though. I've traced many cousin lines to see if anyone could verify any of ther legends, and no one has been able to come up with anything like what I have unearthed., unfortunately.
Supposedly a case of documents that would have explained all was stolen circa 1920 in UK, while the bulk of the eldest line of the family was overseas in India.

Other family legend is that we were Stewarts of Craigiehall, the oldest son being disinherited just before 1600 due to religious differences & an argument with his father who was a weird bloke.

I'm open to any suggestions- and I'm trying not to be biased by existing legends! I'm also trying to trek backwards from fact to fact.

If you trace the Stewarts of Craigiehall lineage down, well the cranky father destroyed evidence of his elder three son's existance, and they left & went to USA we believe- maybe that's where West Indian plantations & money were amassed? Anyhow you'll only find details of one son a certain year, who was a break from the oldest always having been a David- this one was the youngest, and was Archibald, from memory, but I digress, and didn't mean to bring that up, except for interests' sake, and a bit of an explanation of why I favoured the Jacobite story of the coming & going & retaking the name Stewart in such a biggish way.

Please don't be influenced by my biases! Alternative brainstorming ideas do achieve great laterally thought alternatives- and there may be something in one of those avenues.

Thanks again, Ian

Hi Ian, as Auntysherlock says, they may have been born overseas. Two of my three brothers were born abroad. One in South Africa in 1941 another in TransJordon in 1945. I can't find any registration for these two brothers. My third brother and myself were born back in England in 1947 and 1948 and we are both registered. Perhaps there is a different registration method for overseas births to British parents?
Regards

Not sure if this helps.....

Births, Deaths, Marriages and Obituaries

The Newcastle Courant etc (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England), Friday, October 19, 1860; Issue 9695.

At Jarrow in Todd’s-buildings on the 12th inst., age 60, Isabella, wife of Mr. David Turnbull, Shipwright

Hi Rosemary- maybe you're right and they were born overseas...but they were still baptised within four weeks of birth, at Newcastle...so they can't have been too far offshore, I wouldn't have thought.

I don;t know how people in general, or close-knit families felt about pregnant & iminent mothers going on voyages, back in those days- I would have thought offhand, that they'd leave them land-based, if at all possible. Maybe our family just breaks all the rules though...

Susan! Thank you!!!
Is the Newcastle Courant online now?
That's the exact wording a genealogist found in the 1930s for my gg grandfather, of his gg grandmother's Isabella's death. I have her certificate here, and it also says Todds' Buildings, Jarrow. She was born in Alyth in 1801.

She's the first name on her son' David's family burial place, at Jesmond.
It says "the Family Burial Place of David Turnbull Stewart, his beloved mother Isabella Stewart Turnbull...and then lists some children. It took me years to accept the juxtaposition of Stewart & Turnbull as not being an error. Scots women used to append their maiden name as a second name after they married, apparently, hence Isabella Stewart became Isabells Stewart Turnbull.

As for David, well whomever inscribed the tomb would have been given instructions from some relative to call him David Turnbull Stewart, which is how he fashioned himself in the 1860s in the baptism records of his latter three children.

Many thanks for your help folks!

I wonder if this is him..

IGI Individual Record FamilySearch™ International Genealogical Index v5.0
British Isles
Search Results | Download | Print

DAVID TURNBULL Pedigree
Male

Event(s):
Birth:
12 JUL 1826
Christening:
20 JUL 1826 Dundee, Angus, Scotland
Death:
Burial:

Parents:
Father: DAVID TURNBULL Family
Mother: ISABEL STEWART

IGI children of Isabella Stewart and David Turnbull


Results for: Father: David Turnbull, Mother: Isabella Stewart
Exact Spelling: Off
[refine search] [Print]
Prepare selected records for download

International Genealogical Index / British Isles - 8
Select records to download - (50 maximum)
1. JOHN STURROCK TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Male Christening: 22 JAN 1832 Dundee, Angus, Scotland
2. DAVID TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Male Christening: 20 JUL 1826 Dundee, Angus, Scotland
3. WILLIAM STEWART TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Male Christening: 23 JAN 1825 Dundee, Angus, Scotland
4. JANET STEWART TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Female Christening: 14 JUN 1829 Dundee, Angus, Scotland
5. HELEN PULLAR TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Female Christening: 19 APR 1835 Dundee, Angus, Scotland
6. GEORGE TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Male Christening: 11 MAR 1838 Dundee, Angus, Scotland
7. ISABEL TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Female Christening: 07 MAY 1848 Saint Cuthberts, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland
8. Isabel TURNBULL - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Female Christening: 07 MAY 1848 Saint Cuthberts, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland

Hi Ian


LOSS OF A BOMBAY STEAMER AND FIFTY LIVES
Glasgow Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), Monday, February 13, 1871; Issue 9709.


says a Mr David Turnbull Stewart was missing.....Have pm'd you

You may also be interested in the following about David Turnbull Stewart


http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/23553/pages/5982

The Gazettes are searchable and free

Ian

I doubt very much whether there was any such dislike (or whatever you want to call it) re pregnant women travelling.

After all, women were chattels ........... they did and went where there menfolk went, when the menfolk wanted to go!

Just think of the numbers of children born at sea on the way to Australia, India or even America.


I would have also suspected that the way to get to India for most people, if not the majority of them, was to sail from London, Southampton or Portsmouth direct to Bombay. The opening of the Suez Canal would have reduced the time that the trip would take ........ previously they would have sailed around the Horn of Africa


I would never have previously even thought about your suggestion of crossing the English Channel, train down to the Mediterranean, ship across to Egypt, boat down the Suez Canal, etc etc. Far far too cumbersome a trip to take with all your goods and chattels, wife and children ...... and probably very much more expensive!


After all ............. the word "posh" comes from Port Out, Starboard Home. Meaning the preferred side of the ship to have your cabin for shade and a bit of relief from the sun as you travelled to and from India. The shipping line P&O developed its reputation sailing between England and India.


Nope ............ I think your family sailed from London to India, and didn't pay too much attention to whether the wife was pregnant or not.

If they left from Cuba or the West Indies, they might have been able to sail direct across the Atlantic, or gone up to New York and sailed to India from there.



it might be an interesting sideline to actually google and investigate sailing ships in the 1850s through to the 1880s to see where and how they sailed.



EDITED to correct information on "posh"



sylvia

Susan# those are great!

Seems pretty definite David was alive and kicking after 1864 then. ;)

I'm liking the "they weren't his kids" theory more 'n more. And my embellishment: that the church would do anything, but registrars were a bit more hard-nosed.


And indeed, Sylvia, if women hadn't travelled when they were pregnant, women would never have gone nowhere. ;)

well, Janey


unlike today, pregnancy was not an "illness", it was a perfectly natural event, and women were expected to maintain normal life as much as possible ....................... and if that meant taking a sailing ship to India or Australia, then so be it.

There'd be many women on board the ship to help out when the time came ........ and doctors weren't that much used anyway in deliveries.



BTW ..... I like your theory about the kids not being his, and the ethics of lying to the church vs the registrar




sylvia

Susan- thank you a million times, thank you!

I honestly always suspected his death was nearer to 1870 than to 1864 which this 1930s genealogist supposedly told my ggrandfather.


Marion- that is the family- the LDS website was good as far as that goes. What was interesting there is the second names. I have copies of the Old Parish Registers which says all you mention, and names the relative after whom each one's first name was named, in some cases. The second names were dropped, or never used again in later life though (Helen Pullar & John Sturrock, except for Janet Stewart...) I find that intriguing. Whether or not Pullars & Sturrocks were relatives I have yet to ascertain, though it is somewhat likely.

My comments re pregnancies was just a bit of brainstorming, not a certainty.

I'll have a look around the London Gazette, Indian Office- that is interesting- very much so...
at least Turnbull Stewart wasn't a common pair of names. How did you find it- surely not via Mr Google? (But maybe last time I tried, it hadn't been indexed as much...)

I can't think it would be his son, David Henry T S, the one born in 1849, who was my gg grandfather, though he was known to be nowhere nearly as motivated (well, slack bordering on lazy, actually) as his father (DT born 1826) the inventor & former boat owner. Maybe it is the younger one.

Another story we had was that DT, later DTS had a boat named Fanny, named after his wife Frances nee Middelton. It had been sold, and was lost, sunk in a collision with the Carnarvon or Caernaerfon or similar. I did have a photocopy of the clipping mentioning it, years ago, but lost it in a house fire. I'd love to refind that, and the date. I thought it was off the coast of Wales or Liverpool, circa 1860, but my memory's not good on that- I just remember finding it in a newspaper or shipping search I did in London in 1983 when I was over there.
Anyhow, it was NOT insured, and was a total loss for the family, but DT/DTS survived, at least.

THANK YOU ALL, once again for the insights- I really appreciate it!

This may have some relevance......

National Archives

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/search

Colonial Office and Predecessors: West Indies Original Correspondence CO 31...
Correspondence from Dr R R Madden, Mr D R Clarke, Mr David Turnbull and the Foreign Office relating to the removal of 'liberated Africans' from Cuba. Richard Robert Madden was appointed superintendent of the liberated Africans and judge arbitrator in the Date: 1840.
Source: The Catalogue of The National Archives

Hi Susan,
thanks for the thought, but that David Turnbull was a famous anti-slavery campaigner. At one time he was, I think a British consul to Cuba, but he was expelled because he kept criticizing the Cuban gov't's stance on looking the other way & allowing slavery. They would have or did imprison him while he was there, because he would not shut up!
He wrote a book on his travels in Cuba etc and the treatment of slaves when they were supposed to have been liberated, published in around 1845- I have a 1960s reprint of it

He's a namesake, but the wrong age to be any of our DT's.

An interesting red herring all the same-thanks!

Susan- another query...re that Gazette link- I feel sure that DTS was David Henry the son born in 1849. It says he was unemployed at the time. HIs father DTS the inventor would not have been in the same boat! I had a letter from DH's widow wherein she says he was a bit of a loafer before they married in 1882, so that fits in, somewhat.

But what might the phrase "without the fort" mean- it is attached to every name- unless it's a funny was of saying they are not imprisoned...?

Thanks.

The 'unemployed' one was in the gazette.

The one who drowned was an engineer

I suppose it means they didn't live 'within the fort'...sorry...sounds flippant I know. The fort would probably be protection ( military maybe) with gates that could close against any foe. Only by finding out more about the place would we understand exactly how the fort was situated and whether it was just an old saying or for military purposes.

After looking further, there was another mention in the gazette (thanks, Sue) four months previously, with the application for leniency (they called it a prayer) - and the same name- but he was the engineer.
Very interesting- they must have fallen on very hard times.

Then he's really well-thought of after his drowning, (reading some other articles there about it)so they must have made good first.

I did end up working out how to find patents listed, via the gazette- and found a few over 1858-62- giving his address as Newcastle, and Bombay or both, at varying times in that period

Thanks again for the impetus & thoughts- I really appreciate it..

Susan# also gave me the impetus to go back to the Gazette. The lovely GR member who found an Anglo-Boer military record for me at Kew a couple of years ago had also found that person's father's 1883 bankruptcy in the Gazette. I hadn't paid enough attention to it.

I did some browsing last night and found another bankruptcy - the father-in-law of the first one, i.e. the father of my own name-shifting gr-grfather and his sister. One minute he's a mining agent and has an option on a mine lease (someone else found that in the National Archives for me, where I'd never thoght to look for my lowly Hills - in partnership with a fellow Cornishman whose son later became one of Australia's prominent politicians), the next minute, boom, or rather bust. And the addresses in the notices also gave me the exact point when he left his wife, my grx2 grmother, and hooked up with that girlie from Scotland! And then married her, while wife #1 was still living, as far as I can tell ... if she was in fact wife ...

Here, I think I get to inflict the tale on you! Fun with Hills and Moncks:

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards.asp?wci=thread&tk=976217

a tale told even less coherently than yours, but still amusing. ;)

Janey, yours certainly is a queer tale- which needs to be told from the point of view of YOU, and how you figured it out in reverse- that's always more remarkable than the truth, I find.

Our lot- well I had a similar rough time- and I've omitted all sorts of other legends- as I was really wondering why the 'no birth certs' might have happened. Our lot, we wrongly presumes, like many do, to have always had the one surname- that of the oldest son, going back to his father and so on.

It was by chance & lateral thinking, plus adding up notes scrawled in letters from the 1930s which made no sense at all- absolutely none- and after sleeping on it for long enough, I decided to take a really long bit of paper- well several sheets of cartridge paper, and tape them together, to make a 2 ft by 8 ft strip- and then I drew horizontal lines on it from one end to the other, representing various people/families, and I drew vertical breaks every ten inches, representing a decade in the 1800s.- so a year was one inch.

I then created a time line for the tricky people, and tried to get into their shoes, as it were, and live their times, and put some world political history dates and stuff on it too.

That was when it dawned on me that the family ceased to exist before 1882 with their current surname (Middleton-Stewart, ), and by dropping Middleton off, they could be refound, only back until 1859 their current surname (Stewart), and nothing before that, but the name Turnbull kept appearing, occasionally, and yet we knew several of our unfindable ancestors were born in the UK.

Re-searching over the years, and shedding all preconcieved ideas from the mind, opened up the avenues to refind the same family under Turnbull, and it took a bit of working from both ends, and reanalying the few old letters we had and trying to decide that the cranky old great great granny who wrote it wasn't quite as weird as we'd always thought she was.

Unfortunately though she still was somewhat weird, and some facts she wrote were very wrong (referring to a relative as illegitimate, when in fact that relative was OK, but it was her sister who was illegitimate), and other bits she just did not care to bother about the truth- so you had to distil the essence from her nearly illegible scrawl, and then go seeking the real truth, not knowing which end of the snake you were holding!

There were other red herrings, and legends you wanted to bias your searches with, but which had to be ignored till the bare facts were ascertained.

It's hard when dealing with pre 1837 stuff, and Indian/West Indies (like which island out of the hundreds) stuff, and the likelihood of a lack of standard expected records.

The help from here has been wonderful!

In the meantime I still have thousands of questions, in other areas- legends about a brother who threw a fellow overboard a ship in a rage, and fearing the authorities, fled (to USA maybe, or one of a hundred of the West Indies islands?) leaving a wife and kids to never see him again.
Which brother- I can guess- but you have to plod along with the facts, and spread your radar for other influences. etc etc.

All much more interesting (and way slower) than the modern TV detective movies!

Thanks!

I forgot to say we had another relative who came to Australia (where I live) in about 1935- called-David Stewart, or David Middleton-Stewart- but I've located no trace of him whatsoever- and it's a big empty country down here- Monck might have been an easier name to trace than Stewart!

This fellow was more at home in crowded bars & pubs, apparently, than wherever a census might have been found.

I keep hoping I'll eventually find a distant cousin with all the answers, but so far, distant cousins, when I find them, keep coming to me for the answers...!