While researching my mother's family I came across an extract of a death certificate for my 2nd Great-Grandfather Robert McWhinnie, a journeyman joiner, who died on 3^rd July 1883. The cause of death was listed as drowning. I also noticed that the other two individuals listed in the extract also drowned. Intrigued, I searched the Internet and found a report of the sinking of the SS Daphne as it was launched on the Clyde in which 124 people died.

More detail from http://www.happyhaggis.co.uk/daphne.htm:

On the 3rd July 1883 the Clyde shipyards suffered one of their worst disasters. The SS Daphne was a 460-ton steamer to be used on the Glasgow-Ireland run. The ship was launched from the shipbuilding yard of Messrs. Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse, Govan. Within three minutes she had capsized with over 200 workers finishing the internal fittings still on board. 124 died as a result.

A joiner who survived named Kinnaird wrote: "I was busily engaged on the deck, and felt the vessel moving on the ways, and nothing occurred until she had taken the river. Then an extraordinary scene happened, and tremendous shouts arose from those on board. I felt the vessel toppling over to the right and in a moment every person on board was hurled into the water. The shrieks and cries were terrible. I, along with some others, scrambled on to the bottom of the vessel, which was turned upside, and retained a hold. In a few moments a man came round with a small boat, and asked me to jump into the water. I did so, and was rescued. There would be about twenty persons besides myself who clung to the bottom of the vessel, and also succeeded in getting into the boat. Round about I could see a large number of people struggling and shouting in the water. Prior to the accident there were so many men and boys on deck that it was difficult to move about. I believe that over two hundred people were in the vessel. I cannot possibly describe the heart-breaking scenes which I witnessed."

Such was the scale and tragedy of the disaster that there are two SS Daphne Memorials in Glasgow. One is located in Elder Park, Govan and the other on the other side of the Clyde in Victoria Park, Whiteinch, representing the loss to those communities involved.

 

 

Test post. Having twitterfeed issues!

The Scottish Way of Birth and Death, is a history of civil registration in Scotland from its beginning in 1855 until the Second World War.  It shows how the basic tools of Scotland's 'vital statistics' - the registers of births, marriages and deaths, were produced.  This site describes some of the people responsible for Scotland's vital records, the difficulties they experienced, and some of the characteristics of the Scottish registration system.  Amongst other things, it looks at the problems of producing accurate death certificates, regular and 'irregular' marriages (including those at Gretna Green), divorce, compulsory smallpox vaccination, the compiling of the census, and the work of the General Register Office for Scotland in times of war.

(http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/scottishwayofbirthanddeath/)

Their Past Your Future Scotland is a fantastic opportunity to ensure that the memories of war are never forgotten, enabling generations within communities to discover personal stories which have affected or involved their local area.

This is an ‘interim’ website which aims to help TPYF Scotland projects, namely in collecting reminiscences from veterans (both military and civilian) and illustrating them with digitised images.

The results from these oral history projects will form a series of some 300 on-line mini exhibitions or ‘vignettes’ – oral histories and associated illustrative exhibits from local and national collections. They may include diary extracts, newspaper articles, old photographs, archive film, all manner of old documents and paintings. Together they will create a vivid story of a person, event or place.

(http://www.tpyfscotland.org.uk/TPYF_Scotland/)

Spent a bit of time this weekend going through and scanning some old family photographs from my Mum's family. These were all taken between 1895 and 1940 and show my maternal grandmother's family and some of my maternal grandfather.

I think all these photos were taken in and around Govan, Glasgow.

 

Surnames: Graham, McWhinnie, Cassidy, Reid

Came across this website called Tagul on a @geneabloggers tweet which creates an interactive tag cloud which can be placed on your blog and website.

I have used a similar site before called Wordle which does essentially the same thing. That is they are both used for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

The key difference between them is that Wordle creates an image which can be saved while Tagul creates an interactive tag cloud.

This is my first attempt:

This is a non interactive version.The interactive version which updates is on the bottom right of the page.

I have a fairly clear idea in my head of the overall look I want to achieve with  this blog and eventually the Scottish family history website I am going to set up: www.myscotsancestors.co.uk. I have got as far as buying the URL with that one!

I am not very artistic - my attempts at designing a logo look they have been done by my two year old daughter with her eyes closed - so, as a short term measure, have created a simple one using Vistaprint.



I am reasonably happy with its modern and clean look but will get round to updating it sometime.