An Excel(lent) Family Tree

Here’s all the siblings of the Leith families on one spreadsheet:

Leithers 1800-1950

Tracking siblings is key to learning all about a family. Birth order, naming patterns, dates of birth etc. are all clues as to how people lived. In this chart Scottish-born parents are shown in purple and Irish in green. The childrens’ first and middle names are shown along with their d.o.b.s - those in bold are my direct ancestors.

The six families who settled in Leith between 1817 and 1865, Robertson, Hunter, Smith, Greenan, McCabe, and Munro, lived in really crowded tenements on narrow streets near the docks.

George Brodrick Robertson 1882 (my great grandfather) had two families at the same time. He had a total of 13 children with two women: his first wife Matilda Workman, and his girlfriend Catherine Marshall (who he later married). His second family is shown above in the shaded grey area.

I met one of Catherine Marshall’s grandchildren through the Spirit of Leithers FaceBook group and we are now friends. She told me that Catherine was the Robertson’s babysitter. I had figured out part of the story when I was researching why he named his daughter Catherine Marshall. If I hadn’t been looking at sibling naming patterns I would never have solved this mystery.

My mum had mentioned that her grandfather had another family but she didn’t know much about it and thought they were in Fife. Catherine Marshall actually lived around the corner in Leith. (More on their story later)

Families were bigger early on before birth control was available. In my grandparents’ case WWII interrupted childbearing. Their last child was born in 1939.

The Leith families shown as warp (male) and weft (female)