Margaret Howland was born on 9 August 1906 at 46 Brunswick Street, Edinburgh, just off Leith Walk but south of the border with the ancient Burgh of Leith.

Margaret was my grandma and one of the nicest and kindest people you could hope to meet but she didn’t have the easiest of starts to life. Her birth certificate leaves no room for doubt on one particular matter: she was born to unmarried parents, or, to use the language of the time, she was illegitimate. There’s a blank space on the certificate where her father’s name should be.

Piecing together the story of her life, both from documentary sources and from family stories and photographs, I was certain of one thing: my grandma was an only child. And I was certain about that until a few days ago when I discovered that it wasn’t true…

I knew my grandma well. Growing up, we would visit her at least once a year, every year, in her house in Carrick Knowe, a suburb to the west of Edinburgh. When she was in her late 70s or early 80s, she shared a fascinating piece of information with me – she told me that she had known her father and that he was a man called Frederick Porter. This turned out to be slightly wrong – he was actually called Frederick Port – but nevertheless, the revelation opened up research into a whole new area of the family and over the years I have discovered a wealth of information about the Ports – my only English ancestors.

I’ve also spent many happy hours exploring the Howland and their origins on the Isle of Man and I’ve become increasingly interested in finding out more about my grandma’s mother, Margaret Howland senior.

My great grandmother was born in Ballygrant on the isle of Islay, the southernmost of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. She arrived, along with her twin brother John, on 1 December 1872. Their parents, Charles and Catherine Howland, had recently moved from their native Isle of Man and Charles was working as a blacksmith for the Islay Lead Mining Company. The family were only on Islay for a few years before moving to Wanlockhead, a remote lead mining village in the south-west of Scotland which has the distinction of being Scotland’s highest village.

Margaret and John were to grow up in Wanlockhead alongside their three older siblings and two younger ones but in 1880, their mother died. Catherine Howland (née Crinnell) was just 36 years old. Charles was to marry again two years later and he went on to have a further six children with his second wife, Ann Kirk: remarkably, all 13 of Charles’s children survived infancy. [Update: after writing this, I discovered that Charles and Ann had in fact had two children who died in infancy – so there were actually 15 in total!]

Using a variety of records, including birth, marriage and death records, census returns, directories, electoral registers and tax records, I have recently been attempting to work out where each of my more recent ancestors lived on a year-by-year basis. Not only does this help to understand the stories of their lives, it also serves to highlight any gaps in the story. Dr. Sophie Kay has published a fascinating blog post about using timelines to discover ‘negative space’ in your research and how you can use this approach to identify further areas to explore. In the case of my great grandmother, I discovered that I had a gap of 25 years to fill!

The 1881 census finds the Howlands living at Lochnell Cottages in Wanlockhead, the recently widowed Charles working as a blacksmith, the two oldest sons (Charles junior, aged 15, and Thomas, 13) already working in the lead mining industry and the five younger children, including Margaret (aged 7), being looked after by a 21-year old domestic servant. Yes, you’ve guessed it: Ann Kirk, soon to be the children’s stepmother.

Until last weekend, this was the last confirmed sighting I had of Margaret before she appeared in Edinburgh in August 1906, as the mother of an ‘illegitimate’ child. Young single women not living with their families are notoriously difficult to track down: they are unlikely to appear in the obvious records – directories, electoral registers, valuation rolls etc. – as these records generally relate to ownership or rental of property but, although the census is only a snap shot, taken once every ten years, it should have been possible for me to fill in some of the gaps by tracking Margaret down in the 1891 and 1901 returns – wherever she was. But I could find no trace of her.

A few months ago, I was carrying out some extreme online searches, looking for any signs of Margaret in the last few decades of the 19^th century or the first few years of the 20^th when I came across an intriguing record. A single line entry in the admission and discharge register of the Toxteth Union Workhouse (Liverpool) recorded the details of a woman called Margaret Howland who had been admitted to that institution on 4 January 1903 on the order of the Master. The ‘Cause of Seeking Relief’ was recorded as ‘Pregnant’, her address was given as 35 Cullen Street and her year of birth as 1872. She was a single woman, her ‘Trade or Calling’ was given as ‘Charwoman’ and her religion as ‘C.E.’ – i.e., Church of England.

Margaret Howland is not a common name. The surname Howland most frequently occurs in Kent and the south east of England and apart from my own Manx family, occurrences in the north west of England are fairly exceptional. I had no idea what my Scottish great grandmother might be doing in Liverpool in the early 1900s but this reference to a Margaret Howland of exactly the right age was certainly worth looking into. I had a look at the 1901 census returns for 35 Cullen Street, Liverpool but I couldn’t see anything of interest and after trying a few other unproductive searches I put it to one side. My ‘magpie’ mind moved on to other things…

So it was only when I was attempting to identify all the addresses that my great grandmother had lived at throughout her life that I realised how large the gap was on her timeline and I decided to revisit that curious workhouse reference.

Margaret had been discharged from the Toxteth workhouse on 16 January 1903, just twelve days after she was admitted, and there was no evidence to suggest that her pregnancy had resulted in the birth of a child in the workhouse. There was certainly no record of the ‘admission’ of a child to the institution and a search of English civil birth records for the year 1903 revealed nothing relevant in the Liverpool area. In fact, a search of the whole of England and Wales didn’t bring up any births that could possibly relate to this pregnancy. The only Howland birth I could find to unmarried parents in 1903 was that of an unnamed boy registered in West Ashford (Kent) and I was quickly able to eliminate him from my enquiries.

And that’s when I thought that, if this was my great grandmother, I should probably check Scottish birth records as well. And my search turned up something which, despite my suspicions, I really didn’t expect to find: the birth of a Thomas Howland in the St George district of Edinburgh in 1903.

The certificate quickly confirmed that this was a ‘person of interest’: Thomas was born on 22 February 1903 at Edinburgh’s Royal Maternity Hospital and he was the ‘illegitimate’ son of Margaret Howland, a domestic servant of 24 Caledonian Crescent, Edinburgh. And Margaret’s signature on the certificate was a good match with the signature on my grandma’s birth certificate.

I was certain that this was the Margaret Howland who had been admitted to and discharged from the Toxteth workhouse the previous month but could I prove that it was my great grandmother? On the assumption that Thomas had died young, I searched for a record of his death. My search was initially unsuccessful but I soon found the death registration of a Thomas Holland which seemed to fit the bill.

It was the right Thomas. He had died at 24 Caledonian Crescent on 15 April 1903, aged just 7 weeks, of gastro-enteritis. But the certificate had another surprise in store: under the column headed ‘Signature & Qualification of Informant, and Residence, if out of the House in which the Death occurred’, Margaret had signed her name (as Margaret Holland!) and then written, ‘Mother. 10 Shandon Street.’

I instantly recognised this address as the residence of Frederick Thomas Port, the man who, three years later, was to become the father of my grandma.

Does this suggest that Frederick was also the father of young Thomas? Quite possibly, yes – his middle name was Thomas and his father (who had died a few years earlier) was called Thomas. It’s something I intend to consider in a future blog post – but there’s still one more significant episode to explore in this part of the story.

Having found Thomas – my great uncle Thomas! – I wondered whether there were more siblings to discover. As a professional genealogist with over 40 years’ experience I’m somewhat embarrassed to reveal that searching for – and finding – a third child was about as easy as any search could be. There were only three Howland births in Edinburgh between 1880 and 1930 and all three were the children of my great grandmother, Margaret. I could easily have found them at any time in the past 40 years but I never thought to look.

In a desperate attempt to seek excuses, the best I can offer is to say that Sophie Kay’s search for ‘negative space’ works best when you have the structure of a marriage to work with. You know when the couple married and you know when the woman is likely to have reached the end of her child-bearing years and you look for gaps in between those points in time. In Margaret Howland’s case, this structure was missing and I had simply never considered the possibility that there were any gaps to fill

Alice Coleridge Howland was born at the Royal Maternity Hospital (I really need to look at the records of the hospital) on 14 August 1900. Margaret was living at 17 Cheyne Street in the Stockbridge district of Edinburgh at the time and working as a domestic servant. Could Frederick have been Alice’s father as well? Again, I intend to explore this question in a future post, but I did wonder whether the middle name Coleridge might be a nod in the direction of the father’s identity. My feeling is that this probably isn’t the case: the only Coleridge I can find in Edinburgh around this time is a woman – and the fact that she was called Alice is surely not a coincidence. I suspect that Alice Coleridge (an English woman who was born in Devon in 1876 and was working in a draper’s warehouse in Edinburgh at the time of the 1901 census) was a friend of Margaret’s. I need to explore Alice’s life more. I know that she returned to England and died in Devon in 1968 and that she never married. I wonder whether she kept in touch with my great grandmother…

The discovery of young Alice Howland was the key that unlocked the 1901 census for me. Margaret (‘Maggie’) and Alice were living at Cross Keys, in the Fife parish of Beath, boarding with the family of Robert and Charlotte Johnston, an Irish mining family. And there was another boarder: Margaret’s twin brother John. I hadn’t found them previously, partly because they’re in such an unexpected place but also because they’re listed under the name Holland and their birthplaces were unknown.

John was working in Beath as a miner – presumably at the nearby Kirkford Pit. Perhaps he’d been living there for some time, boarding with the Johnston family, and he’d invited Margaret to stay with him for a while. Alice was 7 months old at the time of the 1901 census and Edinburgh was in the grip of a measles epidemic.

The Edinburgh Evening News of 5 February 1901 reported that:

The epidemic of measles … shows no abatement, the intimations of cases for the past month numbering no fewer than 777, a very considerable increase over the preceding month.

Things hadn’t improved by early March. On 5 March the Evening News reported that:

… the epidemic of measles shows no sign of abating, the cases for the month reaching 779. Last year in the same month there were only some 76 cases.

Sadly, Margaret’s efforts to protect her daughter (if indeed that’s what she was trying to do) were unsuccessful. On 6 June 1901, now back in Edinburgh, Alice died of measles and broncho-pneumonia at 38 Caledonian Crescent.

I only know my great grandmother from photographs. She always looks like a determined woman and one who doesn’t give much away. My dad, who lived with her for the first 21 years of his life doesn’t feel like he ever really knew her. She was an ‘inward’ person who kept herself to herself. She died three years before I was born and was never really spoken about. My interest in family history was perhaps partly inspired – or provoked – by this silence – particularly in my paternal family.

As family historians it’s important that we research and record the short lives of our ancestors’ siblings. We need to recognise the impact that their deaths had on the family – and let’s not for a single minute fall into the trap of believing that the frequent occurrence of infant death made it any easier for the parents to come to terms with. Bereavement isn’t something that you get used to.

There are a lot of questions still to answer. What was Margaret doing in Liverpool in January 1903? Where was she in 1891 – I still haven’t found her! And who were the fathers of her first two children? But as a result of these new discoveries I can now welcome Alice and Thomas to the family and proudly add them to the tree. I can also promise that I’ll do my best to ensure that they won’t be forgotten again.

© David Annal, Lifelines Research, 20 August 2022