In the last few days I’ve been looking through some links that Dr Mark Jardine pointed me to, about the Scottish Covenanters – transcriptions of their christening and marriage records, etc. – trying to find anything that could help me to link the Covenanter, James DAVIE (shot dead cir.1673) to the Marion DAVIE who married into my JOHNSTON family, in Bathgate, cir.1720. (See my notes at the bottom of Patrick MAIR and Thomas JOHNSTON – Part 1 )
I’ve not yet found anything particularly useful in that respect! But as I looked through the Covenanter records list, I noticed one or two surnames from completely the other side of my family cropping up repeatedly. “URIE” was the surname that caught my attention. I know that there is some Quaker influence on this side of my family (see my WALTON tree), so it made me think that there could be a connection!
A book that a friend gave me for Christmas; “The Glasgow Boys, In Your Pocket”, (one of the “Glasgow Boys” – Edward Arthur WALTON, being my 2x Gt-grandfather), also influenced me when I began by doing a web search for ““Helen Urie HENDERSON”” (wife of E.A. WALTON); “URIE” was her paternal grandmother’s maiden name. At the moment when I did the search, Helen’s was the one full name that came to mind! My thought was; could I find anything that might link Helen’s URIE ancestors to those Covenanter records?
Given that Helen was the wife of a well-known artist, I was surprised to find only 4 links in the search results! Two of these were to AFamilyHistoryBlog, which means that this site is doing it’s job (I guess that this post will be added to that list in future). The other two links were to other people’s family trees; one of Helen Urie HENDERSON’s material line, and the other covering the family of Edward Arthur WALTON’s maternal grandparents.
Both of these trees give me quite a lot of new material; names, dates, etc. I can’t yet confirm what they claim. I would like to go through these trees, and their sources carefully, for myself, to check their records. I have e-mailed the authors of both sites, hoping to obtain more details. But I don’t have a lot of hope for a reply from the WIGHAM site (Helen’s maternal line), due to the page having last been updated in October 2002 (another page of this site was last updated in July 2005)!
But for my own record, and for the interests of others, I’m posting the website links below.
- https://community.dur.ac.uk/j.d.little/family/Wigham.html – This is the maternal ancestry of Helen Urie HENDERSON. See the link (a screen’s height down the page) to “THEIR DESCENDANTS“, which takes you about 2/3 down the webpage. Then scroll down another 2 screen heights to see “Helen Urie HENDERSON” and “Edward Arthur WALTON”.
- http://bayanne.info/Shetland/getperson.php?personID=I442658&tree=ID1 – The Information card for Edward Arthur WALTON on the Shetland Family History website. From here you can explore a large family tree, going back through Edward’s maternal Grandfather, Thomas Balfour NICHOLSON.
If you know any more about these family connections, please leave a comment below, or use the Contact Page to get in touch.
A Family History Blog 