Two Marys

Mary McKenzie (née Brown), Saskatchewan, 1901

Mary Brown was my great-great-great-grandmother.  She was born in Insch, Aberdeenshire on 13 August 1838 and christened a month later at the local church.  Her father, Francis, was a grieve -- a farm manager; her mother, Sarah Sangster, from a family of farmers at Towie in the parish of Clatt.  Mary was the eldest of eleven children and the only one not born in Clatt: by the time she was two, her parents had returned to that village -- a journey of only a few miles -- and she lived near an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  Within a decade, she was working as a servant of the McKenzie family at the Kennethmont Inn, again just a few miles from Clatt.  At the age of 19, on 3 June 1858, she married James Paterson McKenzie, the younger of the identical twin sons of her employer, and six weeks later their first of their fourteen children was born.

The mid-19th century saw the great migration of Scots, and Mary would have been saying farewell to family and friends from the time she was old enough to speak.  The Sangsters began emigrating as early as 1836 when Mary's aunt Jean and her husband and family left for Upper Canada, and her other aunts and uncles followed.  In 1855 Mary's brother-in-law, William Alexander McKenzie, left Scotland for Canada.  Emigration would have been on everyone's minds: was life really better somewhere else?  In 1867 three of Mary's siblings made the decision to sail for New Zealand, and I've no doubt that Mary and her husband knew that they were soon to leave.

When she said farewell to her siblings, did she know she would never see them again, or did she think that she might follow them to New Zealand?  Mary never left any written record.  In 1868 her uncle and aunt, John and Mary (Sangster) Webster decided to join the Sangsters in Canada; James, Mary and their children went too.  There were lots of aunts, uncles and cousins waiting, new cousins to meet, and of course James' twin brother and his family.  Two years after that, Mary's parents and the rest of her siblings made the decision to leave.  I don't know if Mary had hoped that her parents would join her, but despite having plenty of family in Canada, they sailed instead for New Zealand and their three children already there.

What I do know is that they were able to stay in touch: I have coipes of postcards sent from children of Mary's siblings in New Zealand to her children in Canada, including one announcing the death of Mary's father at the age of 91, and expressing regret that he'd never had his photograph taken.  By this time, Mary would not have seen her father for more than 30 years.

James and Mary had a successful life in Canada, farming for more than a dozen years in Ontario, then taking up the government's offer of land on the Prairies and journeying across the country -- in the winter, with eleven of their children, one of whom was just weeks old -- as far as Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, and then onwards in the spring to Oxbow in the Assiniboia Territory (Saskatchewan) where their eldest son had already claimed his land.  James became recognised as an innovative farmer, planting windbreaks to protect his crops, a practical veterinarian, and a leader of the local Presbyterian church.  Mary's nursing and midwifery skills were highly regarded and many a child of the early pioneers would describe himself as "one of her babies".  Mary died suddenly, aged only 64, on 31 October 1902 at her home in Oxbow; James obituary suggests that theirs was a loving marriage and he never quite recovered from her loss: "In the fall of 1902 the greatest shock of his life came to him, when the angel of death came and took from his side his loving wife who had shared unmurmuringly and with a brave heart the hardships that come to every new settler in a foreign country, and from that time up to the time of his demise, life never seemed to him what it should have been."  She is buried on the Canadian Prairie, under a granite headstone which recalls her early life in Aberdeenshire.

*****

Mary Brown was my great-great-great-grandmother's first cousin.  She was born at Keig, Aberdeenshire on 11 January 1859.  Her father was William, a farmer of 13 acres at Braeside (later at Cardensbrae) in the parish of Keig, and the youngest brother of the Francis Brown mentioned above; her mother was Catherine Taylor, a farmer's daughter from nearby Rayne.  Mary lived at home with her parents until her marriage.  They were neither wealthy nor poor: they had one servant helping in the house, but the farming was done by family members.  Mary was one of seven children. 

When she was fifteen, her mother died of tuberculosis, and her father remarried two years later.  Her stepmother was Elspet "Elsie" Reid, a farmer's daughter from Tullynessle, aged 27 to William's 51: Mary had siblings who were older than her new stepmother.  Four half-siblings followed within a decade, but Mary was no longer living at home.  Just a few months after her father's remarriage, Mary wed the journeyman stonemason John Thompson of Auchleven in the parish of Premnay.  She was 17 and he was 27.  Four children arrived in four years: Catherine Taylor Thomson, named for Mary's mother, in 1877; Peter Brown Thomson, named for Mary's grandmother, in 1879; and then twins John Maconnachie Thomson and Mary Maggie Thomson, named for their paternal grandmother's family, in the summer of 1881.

Sometime during the winter of 1882-3, Mary and John separated.  I don't know why.  Could it be the age difference, four children in such rapid succession, her husband having to travel to find work?  When Mary's daughter Christina was born in Insch on 19 April 1884, Mary told the registrar that the baby's parents were "Mary Brown, wife of John Thomson, Mason, who she declares is not the Father of her child and further that she has had no personal communication with him for the past sixteen months".  Who was Christina's father?  Did the child even know?  Christina would marry twice, the first time giving her father's name as John Thomson, stonemason, deceased, and the second time leaving the question blank.

By 1891 Mary, stating that she was a widow, had had two further children and was living in a small house in Insch; at the time of their births she gave the same details -- that she was the wife of John Thomson, stonemason, but he was not the father and she not had any personal communication with him for four and seven years respectively.  She had no occupation other than 'formerly a domestic servant', and no apparent means of support.  Although her siblings, aunts and uncles could be found at each other's houses at census time, or as sponsors at baptisms and witnesses at weddings, Mary and her children were on their own.  How was she supporting her growing family?  The fact that her family kept growing suggests a clue to her income, as does the apparent lack of contact with her parents and siblings.

When I first saw that Mary had had one illegitimate child, I smiled: every person who writes to the Daily Mail condemning the rise in the numbers of children born to unwed parents should probably take a closer look at their own family tree.  When I saw that Mary had had two, then three...then six illegitimate children, my smile faded.  An indiscretion, a by-blow, a whatever-you-want-to-call-it, is not that uncommon, and usually absorbed by the extended family.  Six, however, makes me think a lot more about the life she was leading, about the likely condemnation she would have faced in a relatively small community, about the struggles she would have had to raise her family.

Some of her children must have known or suspected the identity of their respective fathers: Georgina Thomson's marriage record said that her father was George Walker, a journeyman slater from Inverurie; Helen Ann Sievewright Brown, Jessie Sievewright Brown and Alice Gregor / McGregor Brown all have clues to their fathers' identities in their middle names.

By 1901 Mary's elder children were employed at the wool mill in Skene, and she had taken in a female lodger, also a wool mill worker.  All of her children survived to adulthood, most living into their 70s or 80s, but Mary didn't live to see their families.  Two years after the census her eldest son brought her to the Royal Infirmary at Aberdeen.  She passed her forty-fourth birthday there, suffering from a fever, and died four days later: 108 years ago today.