Tales and Timelines: Family Histories of Our Ancestors

By Rosemary J Morrison

This book comprises the ancestries, as far as I can trace them, of up to seven generations of our McASLAN and RENWICK parents’ families.
As a student, our father researched his own surname, McASLAN, back to the late seventeenth century. Much later, he obtained approval of his researches from the Lord Lyon King of Arms. But he did not research his mother’s family. Nor did he research his wife's / our mother's ancestors. This book thus provides a full ancestry of ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823083355

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© 2023 Rosemary J Morrison. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/16/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8333-1 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8334-8 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8335-5 (e)

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Our Parents

Our Grandparents

Our Great Grandparents

Our Great, Great Grandparents

Our Great Great Great Grandparents

Great Great Great Great Grandparents

Our Great Great Great Great Great Grandparents

Conclusions

Appendix

Bibliography

Pictures

Preface

THIS BOOK comprises the ancestries, as far as I can trace them, of up to seven generations of our McASLAN and RENWICK parents’ families.

As a student, our father researched his own surname, McASLAN, back to the late seventeenth century. Much later, he obtained approval of his researches from the Lord Lyon King of Arms.

But he did not research his mother’s family.

Over the last twenty years, I have tried to make good that omission, visiting some of the places that our non-McAslan grandparents - CRAWFORD, RENWICK and WELLS - and their own forebears, came from.

I have not reproduced family trees, with siblings, aunts and uncles, going back, in some cases, also to the seventeenth century. The full Renwick family tree alone extends a metre in width and depth.

Nor have I added maps from the times that each of the generations lived. Streets have been re-named or closed, and new roads built.

I have, however, provided a Bibliography, and added an Appendix, with summaries for each of our direct ancestors, if you would care to draw up your own family trees.

At the point of writing this Preface, I have not seen publishers’ proofs, with page numbers, so have not provided an Index. The Contents page, however, lists the order in which the several parts of the book will be printed.

Bowden, 2023.

Introduction

Although I and my three full¹ siblings spent our childhoods in the countryside, each of us was born in Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, and formerly The Second City of the British Empire.

Our parents and grandparents were also born in Glasgow – our parents in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the First World War, and our grandparents thirty years before, when the city was at its grandest.

At the time of his death in 1920, our great grandfather Renwick had been the city’s Town Clerk Depute, living in a grand house overlooking Queen’s Park.

In the 1950s our McAslan grandfather was a local politician - senior Councillor of Glasgow Town Council, a baillie sitting in judgement at local courts, Lord Lieutenant Depute anad Justice of the Peace.

Apart from one ancestor, whom I traced as born in Glasgow’s Govan parish in the seventeenth century, and who subsequently left the city, all of our earlier ancestors had rural backrounds. Before 1700, even villages were a rarity, the bulk of Scotland’s population spread among innumerable fermtouns, most of which have disappeared, now known only from names on old county or estate maps.

When our father researched the origins of his/our family, the only sources were parish registers of baptisms, marriage banns and (much less frequently) burials, kept by the church; the accuracy of these records depended on the enthusiasm of parish officials, moral, disciplinary, and practical considerations, such as distance and cost, and schisms within and separations from the Church of Scotland itself.

Since the 1940s, many more Scottish records have been collected, transcribed and computerised. I have visited most parishes, and listed my main written sources in the Bibliography.

Irish records – we have at least four sixteenths Irish genes – were lost in a political fire. But with help from distant relatives, I have traced some origins of our family over the water.

Our Parents

THOMAS CRAWFORD MCASLAN and JEAN WELLS RENWICK were both born in the same year, 1923, in Langside, a South Side suburb in Glasgow.

I often wondered whether, as a genealogist, our father did not like his first two names, THOMAS and CRAWFORD. As eldest son, did he feel that he should have been named after his paternal grandfather, the successful Alexander?

The reason was that Crawford, as he was always known, to distinguish him from his mother’s father and brother, both already named Thomas, was his parents’ second son. Two years before, and following the Scottish custom, the first-born McAslan son had been named Alexander after his paternal grandfather, but survived only four days. Thus, born two years later, our father was named Thomas Crawford after his maternal grandfather.

Arrangements for Crawford’s baptism in his McAslan grandparents’ Baptist church² may have been delayed until he was a young adult, as was the denomination’s practice; but, after the early loss of the first child, he may have been christened soon after birth in his mother’s Congregational church in Bridgeton.³

Jean was probably christened in Eastwood Parish Church, close to her maternal grandparents’ home in Newlands, and whose minister had married her parents eleven years before. Later, she would receive a prize for Bible knowledge from Claremont Church, in the West End of Glasgow, where the family had now moved to allow her older sister easy access to early morning classes at the University; this may be why, on 16th April 1946 – although by now she and her parents had returned to the South Side - she and Crawford were married in that same (Claremont) church– and why our own home was later given the same name.

Both Crawford and Jean attended the separate Boys’ and Girls’ High Schools of Glasgow, in the city’s West End – initially a long distance for both to travel each day.

Crawford’s school fees – and those of his three siblings and twenty four cousins - were paid by his McAslan grandfather.

I should imagine that Jean’s school fees were paid by her lawyer father, a lawyer. Her oldest sister, Muriel, had attended Hutchesons’ Grammar School, on the South Side, as her father had done forty years before, until she broke the rules by riding her bicycle in the school playground; she was then removed and sent across the city to the Girls’ High School, as were, later, her two younger sisters.

Living close to her mother’s relatives, Jean had felt very secure at home. But now, left-handed, she struggled at school, and had to repeat the first year.

Crawford, on the other hand, was clever, sporting and artistic⁴. I was told by a relative that he was always held out as an example to his siblings and cousins.

When, in September 1939, the Second World War broke out, the Boys’ High School’s senior classes were evacuated to Marr College in Troon, on the Clyde coast, and it must have been there, in 1940, that Crawford sat - and passed - his Higher School Leaving examinations. This meant that, later in the same year, he could embark on a medical degree course at the University of Glasgow.

In the same year, Jean’s father’s (male) office assistants had gone off to war. And so, now sixteen, she would start work in her father’s legal office, along with her older law graduate sister.

Due to the War, the length of Crawford’s medical course was reduced from six years to five, and, because of his later academic successes, I presume he passed his examinations easily. I don’t know how he and Jean met – possibly at a dance at the University Union, close to her Royal Terrace home. In his spare time, he and Jean took ballroom dancing lessons, and cycled to surrounding areas to research his new interests – photography, and genealogy, or as it is now known, Family History.

I must have been about twelve, when my father showed me his researches into the McAslan family. At the time, I didn’t think to ask why, as a medical practitioner, he had become interested in genealogy; since then I have wondered whether it was because, as an historian, Jean’s grandfather had been honoured with the Freedom of his home town, Peebles, and by the University of Glasgow with an LL.D.. Might Crawford have hoped that he too could trace a distinguished ancestry?

The War ended in August 1945. Crawford had graduated the previous month, and had already begun his (reduced) period as a House Officer in the genito-urinary department of the Victoria Infirmary – perhaps chosen because the Infirmary was in Langside, close to where Jean and her parents had now returned to care for her elderly, twice-widowed, Wells grandfather.

This must have been when Crawford and Jean became engaged, the wedding planned for the following April, when Crawford would start his two years’ period of National Service with the Royal Navy.

At a time of post-war austerity, I don’t know how material was found for Jean’s and her bridesmaids’ primrose-yellow dresses. Possibly fine cloth was sourced through Crawford’s father – who, as Aunt Isobel later told me, knew everyone.

And maybe it was only now that Jean attended a Cordon Bleu course at Glasgow’s College of Domestic Science. Although she would already have been taught to cook by her mother, in those pre-National Health Service times, doctor’s wives were expected to entertain lavishly!

The wedding took place on 16th April 1946. Maybe there was no time for a honeymoon – by the end of the month, Crawford was expected to report for duty in Portsmouth, on the English Channel, five hundred miles south, and accommodation had to be found.

In the event, Crawford and Jean found digs a mile to the east of Portsmouth, in Southport. I have seen their flat, one street up from the promenade, itself bordered, when I visited, with lawns and bright flowerbeds. Was it like that in 1946? I know that my mother enjoyed walking me there in my pram.

But, before I was born, our parents spent their off-duty time at the Officers’ Club, where our mother made friends with another Scot, Anne McEwan-Waghorn, whose daughter I later visited from school. A second friend at the Club was Rosemary – which is why, the following year, I was given the