Getting started

I am creating this blog as a place to collect and record some family history – starting with James Riddell (1890 – 1973) and his wife Catherine Gordon (1893 – 1980). They were initially from the Rhynie and Cabrach parishes of North-East Scotland, and later moved to Mortlach and Dufftown. They were my maternal grandparents.

Catherine’s parents (John and Christina Gordon) were tenant farmers at Greenloan farm in the lower Cabrach – and Catherine was their only child. James Riddell came to work as a servant on the farm (in about 1911?), and he eventually married Catherine (on the 4th December 1913, at the Gordon Temperance Hotel Hall in Huntly). Their first child (my mother Dorothy Riddell) was born on the 5th January 1914, and so we have to conclude that this was something of a "shotgun wedding".

I have a few photos from their early life and I will start by posting this one of James and Catherine at Greenloan Farm in 1914, when they are posing with their (presumably new) binder. The binder was a horse-drawn implement for cutting grain crop and binding it into sheaves – which were then stacked together in stooks for drying. 

From the left in the photo are Catherine Riddell, her mother, Christina Gordon  (nee Gardiner) holding a baby (my mother Dorothy), her husband John Gordon, an unknown male, and then James Riddell  sitting on the binder.
James and Catherine went on to have 5 more children: Catherine (Cathie) in March 1915, John in 1917, Ella in 1918, William in 1920, Annie in 1922. 
James served in the Gordon Highlanders (and was seconded to the Machine Gun Corps) from 1917 through 1918. Otherwise James, Catherine and their family remained at Greenloan until 1933, when they moved to take responsibility for their own farm - Wardhead, near Dufftown.
Cathie married Andrew Cantlie in 1936. Andrew had grown up on the nearby farm of Bakebare (at Auchindoun in Mortlach parish), and he and Cathie stayed on working at Greenloan until moving to their own farm (Wester Calcots, near Elgin) in 1945?

Christina Gordon died in January 1943 at Greenloan, and John Gordon died at Stephen Cottage Hospital in Dufftown in January 1946. An obituary for John Gordon was published in the local paper (Dufftown News?), and I will include a transcription in a follow-up post. They are buried at Grange Churchyard.