The newspaper reports were transcribed by ScottishMining.co.uk at http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/320.html which is where I have copied them from. He married “Ellen”, Helen Hutchinson Boyd (1908-1988) and they had two daughters, one of whom married. Fish suppers, card games, and other indoor entertainments come to mind. Sundrum.” Sundrum is just to the south west of this image: Samuel had been a coal miner at least since the age of 13, and he lived in Woodside with his parents and some siblings (1861, 1871). I was 10 or 11… oh jings, and she was then a decade younger than I am now! Moreover, the connection with the Speir family needs to be researched (see the To Do list). Ordnance Survey maps accessible via National Library of Scotland online have been indispensable, as I have gradually learned about the locations here.

Memories involve visiting the grandparents in Garrowhill.

I’ll introduce my mother-in-law’s parents now; it will anchor what comes later. The family appears bigger yet: there are two other parents Samuel Hay and Helin McMillan in the parish of Straiton, 13 miles to the south.

I do know that upwardly mobile or douce and perjink Scots used to (and may still) view the Scots language as slang, a local dialect, degenerate English and old-fashioned.

Who is that man in the background, immediately above? “Coylton is one of the smallest civil parishes in Ayrshire in geographical sense, but it boasted a sizeable population during the peak of the coal mining industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Norse-Franck-Gallo-Roman) origin rather than an Irish Celtic one. A pleasant drive of half an hour brings us to Woodside, and a row of miners’ houses also belonging to the Annbank Company. The village is said to take its name from “Auld King Coil of Coilsfield” (Coel Hen) but old records have it spelt Quiltoun or Cuilton.”, “The village at the heart of the parish is almost linear, being spread along the length of the Ayr to Cumnock A70 road – which is used by the heavy trucks sustaining the modern open-cast coal mining industry.

Residents of Jordanhill, one of the city’s most desirable neighbourhoods, were told it will cost up to £5000 each to pay for mines that crisscross the area to be filled in. Extensive coal-works are in its vicinity, and are connected with the Ardrossan branch of the Glasgow and South-Western railway by a single-line railroad.

Thanks – now Wisconsin… I’m off to look up that familiar name on Wikipedia, because I know absolutely nothing about the State at all, except *roughly* where it is. Details not certain.

A Scottish socio-demographic study of wedding dates would be interesting, but I can only say that being married on Xmas Day or Boxing Day was not uncommon in 19th C. England.

The current parish church, built in 1832, is located in Hillhead alongside houses that were miner’s row houses in the late 19th century, more of which can be seen in Joppa. In the early 20th C., Ayrshire had 14,000 coal miners (producing 4 million tons of coal annually).

Or select a “side-by-side” or “spy” view.

https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/AYR/Coylton notes that the Troon and District Family History Society has published a book of Monumental Inscriptions for Coylton. There are several reasons: Jenny was the last to bear the Hay surname in this tree, and she was born in the parish of Coylton, the main setting for the story, and I have photographs.

My brother holds all my research at the moment so I can’t remember whether it was Woodend or Woodside they lived. Both James and Susan died in their 60s. Thomas Wyper (70) from the parish of Barony in Lanarkshire worked as a guardman at pit, Isabella (67, wife) also Barony. Still trying to get a hold of the other information I had on Ayrshire mining near Ayr. Mossside Cottage (2 windowed rooms). Her father signed the register. I will come back to Jenny and her siblings in Bardouran (1901, 1911) at the end. Her home has vanished, and she herself died in 1973, nearly 50 years ago.

1 (#28) and No.2 (#29), all these being cottages with one windowed room. Like his grand-father and name-sake, Samuel had married a woman called McMillan. The railway had reached Waterside in 1858 for the high quality coal being extracted from deep mines. I’ll define “Generation Zero” as being Jenny, her husband, siblings and cousins. First, Samuel, Janet, and all their neighbours on the census page: fact-crumbs for descendants of those neighbours to find, perhaps. Thirty years later, Mossside Cottage was the home of a William Hay, a Coylton parish councillor – I don’t know if he was a relative. Of course, originally I thought this was just a repeated name coincidence, but now of course, as I write this, the fact that Janet’s parents were from Straiton and Coylton prompts the question: were James and Janet cousins? We can guess what their views might have been, in broad terms, if not in detail. It was a residential area built in the 1930s in the east of the Glasgow metropolitan area, whereas the grand-daughters lived in the west of Glasgow.

Just possibly it was in the late 30s after the toffee factory business had ended, up to WW2, because I can’t imagine they would have been able to operate during WW2. I guess they moved (back) to Scotland for economic reasons. Im just not sure why the Hay clan would of moved to Ireland to begin with? I was trying to work it out do you reckon it was the 1950s? They lived in Paisley, southwest of Glasgow. In her case, the goitre was probably caused by an overactive and swollen thyroid, given the mention of her bulging (exophthalmic) eyes. (I should explain perhaps that “Jock Tamson” is an Everyman name like “John Doe” and in English would be “John Thomson”… and that a real John Thomson features in a tragic story below.). Well researched article, it certainly comes to life with the photos.

There was an incident at a local mine in 1844, on Monday 16 December, involving a John Thomson aged “about sixty” and a work-mate called Hay. He was very much respected in the neighbourhood, and has left a wife and family to mourn the melancholy event.