52 Ancestors - Week 17 - Cemetery - Jean McMichael
On Armistice Day last year I was sent a very special photograph - a boy placing red roses, as poppies were out of season, beneath a gravestone in a kirkyard in the south west of Scotland. That photograph tells the story of 160 years of my Scottish family history. The boy is my nephew and the gravestone is a memorial to his great great grandparents, his grandparents and great aunt and uncle.
The saddest part is the initial reason for the headstone. In May 1916 my grandfather, John, was in the south of England awaiting embarkation to France with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, I think. He spied a notice asking him to visit the padre. The news was bad - his 11 month old daughter, Jean, had passed away. He was given leave to return to Scotland to bury her before returning to his unit at the front.
While that is sad enough, I then think about the man who carved the headstone - her grandfather, Sandy King, a monumental mason. Jean and her mother, Mary, who was an only child, had been living with Sandy and his wife Jeannie while John was away. What a challenge it must have been for Sandy to choose the piece of red sandstone from Corncockle quarry and to come up with a design to commemorate his grand-daughter. It would have been carved in a lean-to next to their home before being taken to the kirkyard where so much of his work still survives.
The stone would have been untouched for at least 13 years before Sandy himself passed away in 1929 aged 68. By then he had two grandsons, James born in 1918 and Alexander, my father. I realised the other day that James would have been conceived around Christmas 1917 - John must have been granted leave over the Christmas period. In 1933, in the midst of the depression, after she had been forced out of the rented cottage where Jean had died, Sandy's wife Jeannie, passed away in hospital from senile decay. It's hard to know when the family would have had the funds to add her name to the headstone.
John, Jean's father, survived the First World War and spent the Second World War fearing for James who was in the RAF and Alex who luckily didn't set foot in Europe until just after D-Day. John passed away in 1970 and Mary, who never recovered from her daughter's death, in 1975. It's poignant that we heard the news of Mary's death in New Zealand on ANZAC Day, the day when we remember our war dead.
The headstone then shows a major change. The next two names are my parents, Alex and Fay. Both died and are buried in New Zealand where my father emigrated in 1949 because there were no jobs in Scotland after the war. My brother had their names, birth and death places, added after their deaths in 2003 and 2006 respectively. There wasn't much room left on the stone by then. James, too emigrated to New Zealand as an old man in 1989 after the deaths of his parents, whom he had looked after for many years. His ashes now lie in the grave after his death in 2011, 95 years after his older sister, Jean. James's name is engraved on the plinth underneath the stone. You can't see it because of the flowers lain by our youngest family member.
The saddest part is the initial reason for the headstone. In May 1916 my grandfather, John, was in the south of England awaiting embarkation to France with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, I think. He spied a notice asking him to visit the padre. The news was bad - his 11 month old daughter, Jean, had passed away. He was given leave to return to Scotland to bury her before returning to his unit at the front.
While that is sad enough, I then think about the man who carved the headstone - her grandfather, Sandy King, a monumental mason. Jean and her mother, Mary, who was an only child, had been living with Sandy and his wife Jeannie while John was away. What a challenge it must have been for Sandy to choose the piece of red sandstone from Corncockle quarry and to come up with a design to commemorate his grand-daughter. It would have been carved in a lean-to next to their home before being taken to the kirkyard where so much of his work still survives.
The stone would have been untouched for at least 13 years before Sandy himself passed away in 1929 aged 68. By then he had two grandsons, James born in 1918 and Alexander, my father. I realised the other day that James would have been conceived around Christmas 1917 - John must have been granted leave over the Christmas period. In 1933, in the midst of the depression, after she had been forced out of the rented cottage where Jean had died, Sandy's wife Jeannie, passed away in hospital from senile decay. It's hard to know when the family would have had the funds to add her name to the headstone.
John, Jean's father, survived the First World War and spent the Second World War fearing for James who was in the RAF and Alex who luckily didn't set foot in Europe until just after D-Day. John passed away in 1970 and Mary, who never recovered from her daughter's death, in 1975. It's poignant that we heard the news of Mary's death in New Zealand on ANZAC Day, the day when we remember our war dead.
The headstone then shows a major change. The next two names are my parents, Alex and Fay. Both died and are buried in New Zealand where my father emigrated in 1949 because there were no jobs in Scotland after the war. My brother had their names, birth and death places, added after their deaths in 2003 and 2006 respectively. There wasn't much room left on the stone by then. James, too emigrated to New Zealand as an old man in 1989 after the deaths of his parents, whom he had looked after for many years. His ashes now lie in the grave after his death in 2011, 95 years after his older sister, Jean. James's name is engraved on the plinth underneath the stone. You can't see it because of the flowers lain by our youngest family member.
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