Hi Mamie and Tricia

Thanks for all your comments on these resurrected threads, and sorry for my delay in replying.

Tricia has given me incontrovertible evidence I had the wrong James Robertson (b abt 1833) in Caithness and I have removed him and Elizabeth Gray (+ relatives) from my tree on Ancestry. This tree has been private for a while. Other members on Ancestry copied parts of my tree (including my grandfather!) and although I contacted them to share info, I never received any replies.

My brother and I are sure we were told that that both James Robertson and Eliza MacDonald came from Caithness - she definitely did.

James' birth (calculated from English death cert) is abt 1833. I have his family on censuses - Berwick then various places in Durham down to 1911. I know these to be correct.

I made too many assumptions about James in Caithness though. The family story was one of great poverty, scraping a living from the land, hence the move south via Aberdeen (where they married in 1854) and Berwick (1861). As my father spoke of them living in the Thurso area (Eliza's family) and also the Pentland Firth, I thought it likely that James' birthplace might have been Canisbay.

When I looked at the James Robertsons born c 1833 in Caithness, most seemed implausible.

Not the son of Patrick and Euphemia Robertson (teachers) who seem to have left caithness by 1851. We are all teachers in my family, but the ancestral story was of farming.

Not the grandson of the Calders - he's still there in 1861.

Not the son of Donald and Barbara Simpson - married Catherine Gair 1857.

Not the son of James and Isabella - still in Caithness in 1861.

etc.

And now I know he was not the son of William Robertson and Elizabeth Gray - this is where I made my mistake as the probably widowed cottager Elizabeth, living in Canisbay, fitted the profile of the family story, although I had no proof.

I don't have time to do any searching atm, but perhaps my father was wrong, or did not know all the facts about his grandfather coming from Caithness. I have often wondered why they married in Aberdeen and not Caithness. Their first recorded son was born the following year and named for Eliza's father Hugh, it seems. The next two were James and William. They had eight sons but no daughters to indicate a possible naming pattern on the maternal side.

Thank you so much for your suggestions and interest - and apologies for appropriating the wrong JR!

Helen