Introduction
On 7 December 1884, my great-great-grandfather’s sister, Margaret Jolly, died at number 33 Cowgate, Edinburgh. Scotland’s capital city was just over 100 miles from rural Benholm, Kincardineshire (now in Aberdeenshire), where Margaret was born on 25 February 1834.
At the time of her death from cervical cancer, she was the alleged wife of John Campbell, a dock labourer. Orphaned at an early age, and the eldest of five children, teenage Margaret was forced to provide for herself by working as a flax spinner in the more urban Montrose (to where the family had relocated). She married a weaver, twenty years her senior, in Dundee on 25 November 1859 and began a family. Sadly, he died ten years later and Margaret seems to have migrated to Edinburgh by 1873 in search of support for her children. She went on to have at least four illegitimate children in Edinburgh with John Campbell.
