News Update!

I feel I should post an update to this blog, to explain why it has effectively ground to a halt. I continue to be interested in exploring my family background, including the maternal line described here.   Over the last couple of years I have occasionally been adding to a family tree at ancestry.com.  The tree is called McWhistory, and it goes further back and also much wider than the entries in this blog. This includes some extensive exploration of my maternal side (Riddell), and has led to several meetings with new-found cousins (2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th) and even to an extended family gathering.  DNA tests have helped in establishing or verifying many of those connections, including several in Canada (especially), the USA, Australia, New Zealand.

For anyone who would like to see the McWhistory tree, it is available for public viewing at ancestry.com. At the time of writing there over 1000 named people in the tree, including lots of Riddells.  Please let me know if you have difficulty in locating it, and I will send an invitation with a specific link.  And of course I will welcome any suggestions for improvement.

Finally (for now) I will attach a photo of our Riddell cousin gathering held in April 2019 at Baxter’s in Fochabers – and a colourised version of the 1914 photo of my grandparents at Greenloan.  Thanks to myheritage.com for the free use of deoldify software.

 

WW1

I wanted this post to be about James Riddell’s service during the First World War, but I regret that I have very little in the way of firm facts. Having been born in 1890 he would have been aged 24 at the outbreak of war, but the father of an infant and with another on the way. As an agricultural worker he would have been expected to stay in that role in the early years of the war. Conscription was introduced in 1916, and as far as I am aware there was no formal “reserved occupation” exclusion.

I don’t know whether James was eventually conscripted or whether he voluntarily signed up. But I do know that he joined up, probably in 1917 – I believe in the Gordon Highlanders, and probably joining up at Huntly. I know that he was in France at the end of the war, but the one time he started to speak to me about this, his wife (my Granny) interrupted and discouraged the telling of the tale.

He would have received at least a service medal at the end of the war, but I don’t know what happened to this. Nor do I know his service number. Many service records were destroyed in a major fire at the National Archives at Kew; so it is unlikely that we will ever manage to know much more, but I will have a go at the Gordon Highlanders Museum in Aberdeen. I stopped in there a few weeks ago and am pleased to report that it an interesting place, staffed by very helpful volunteers. The only real evidence of his service that I have is this photo in uniform, wearing the cap badge of the Machine Gun Corps (MGC). The MGC was formed in 1915, and many ordinary soldiers were compulsorily transferred from infantry regiments.  I also attach a picture of the MGC cap badge, just to confirm what he is wearing.

His brothers Frederick and Hugh would have been aged 22 and 15 respectively at the start of WW1, and so it is quite likely that at least Fred would have undertaken some military service. But he too was in agricultural employment, and was married with a very young family. I have no knowledge of WW1 service by either of the brothers, but I will see what I can find in due course.

Pedigree charts

I have been digging into the ancestry of both grandfather James Riddell and grandmother Catherine Gordon, partly just by gathering what some of my cousins can tell me in order to expand on my own limited knowledge.

On the Riddell side it has helped that I have made contact with a distant cousin who lives in Australia. It turns out that we have common ancestors in James Meldrum (b. 1744) and Janet Largue (b.1751) in the Kennethmont area of Aberdeenshire. They were our gggg-grandparents, which means that we are 5th cousins.
And on the Gordon side I have also been in touch with a similarly distant relative in Canada who has been very helpful. I will keep each of these folks anonymous for now, but they have been very useful in my efforts so far.

So I now have a rather better understanding of the ancestry (or "pedigree" in genealogical terms) of each of my grandparents. There are still many gaps, but I have written up what I have so far, and produced a copy of the two pedigree charts as I currently understand them. And I attach jpeg copies below on the assumption that these will be of some interest to anyone browsing here. In fact I can now see that they are pretty illegible here - unless you are interested enough to download copies to your own device. I will intend to come back to upload PDF copies which should be better.

Of course these charts still represent work in progress, but I would like to share in order to invite any comment or correction which you can offer.
As a final note here, I will say that I intend to join a genealogical website sometime soon, where I will upload what I have so far, and where I expect to be able to flesh out these charts a bit - and maybe to encounter some more otherwise unknown distant cousins. 

John Gordon and Christina Gardiner

John Gordon was born on the 21st August 1862 at Aldivalloch in Gaugh, Cabrach - also known as the Daugh. His wife Christina Gardiner was born on the 8th May 1865 in the parish of Grange, Banffshire.
Christina died at Greenloan in January 1943, and John died in Dufftown in January 1946 - with the following obituary published in a local newspaper (probably the Dufftown News - known as the Squeak?).

THE LATE MR JOHN GORDON.The funeral took place from Wardhead, Dufftown (the home of his son-in-law) to Grange Churchyard on Wednesday  (22 January 1946) of Mr John Gordon, late of Greenloan, Cabrach, who died at Stephen Cottage Hospital on Sunday in his 85^th year. Mr Gordon was born at the Daugh, Upper Cabrach, but in his younger days was a shepherd and later a farmer, and carried on a successful general merchant’s and seedman’s business in Grange, of which parish his wife was a native, and by whom he was predeceased 4 years ago – after celebrating their golden wedding. In 1905 he tenanted the farm at Greenloan, Cabrach, where he remained until he retired in May 1945, when he went to Dufftown to stay with his only daughter, Mrs Riddell, Wardhead, by whom he is survived. He also leaves six grandchildren, and five great grandchildren.

And here are some of the very few photos of them which I have - firstly with James Riddell and Catherine, and their granddaughter Dorothy, secondly with granddaughter Cathie, and then at some later point in their life. 

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.