Our family in Paisley
This is a map I did in 2023 showing the places where our ancestors lived and worked over the years - and where I was born! Look closely! The earliest Paisley resident on our family tree is James Gib, a maltman (brewer) who was born in 1668. His granddaughter Agnes married Edward McMillan around the year 1760.
Paisley was rapidly growing as a textile town and attracting skilled weavers such as William Templeton b 1765 who came from the village of Auchinleck in Ayrshire. William married Catherine McMillan in 1792 and lived on George Street in the heart of the weaving community. [Shown on the map by a shuttle]. He lived to the ripe old age of 89 and died at his son William’s home at 13 Canal Street.
His son William Templeton b 1796 was a grocer for many years. He married a girl from Kilmarnock, Margaret Thomson and they ran the store together with their daughters. Margaret kept working as a widow for 18 years . In 1879 she was listed as “victualler, grocer, and spirit dealer” in Watson’s Directory. [Shown on the map by the cash register]
Their daughter Ann Raeburn Templeton b 1833 married John McInnes b 1828, a calico printer from Dumbarton who had moved to Paisley in 1851. His first wife was the daughter of a grocer at Blackland Mill [see inset]. They were only married a few years when she died and John remarried. Sadly he died at age 38, from tuberculosis only four years after he married Ann.
Ann moved back to Paisley and raised their three children, working as a hosier, a draper, and housekeeper. My great grandmother Margaret Thomson McInnes b 1863 lived with her grandparents at 13 Canal Street and became a seamstress.
She married James Fairlie Moffat b 1862, a master butcher, in 1888 at the Baptist church and the reception was at the Town Hall.
James was the son of the first Moffat to come to Paisley: James Moffat b 1832
James arrived in 1855 and set up his tailors shop at 7 Broomlands. He married an Irish girl from Lisburn in Antrim, a seamstress named Eliza Ann Moore. Together they ran the shop for forty years. The census of 1861 shows they employed “three men and a boy”.
Eliza’s Irish mother’s maiden name was Ferlie, which got changed to Fairlie when it was written down by a Scottish registrar.
That is SEVEN GENERATIONS taking us to the end of the 19th century! Here’s the story of the Moffats in Paisley:
James Moffat, tailor, arrives in 1853 from Airdrie. James was the last child of eight of weaver Alexander Moffat. Several generations of Moffats lives in Airdrie and were weavers and tailors.
James Fairlie Moffat, master butcher, moves to Glasgow for a few years with his wife Margaret Thomson McInnes. My grandfather John McInnes Moffat is born there in 1890. The family are doing well and have a holiday home (a rental) in Largs on the coast of Ayrshire. James is on a grass bowling team and everything is rosy.
In 1899 James (tailor) dies while at Largs and soon after that James Fairlie Moffat and the family move back to Paisley. James stops being a butcher (although his two of his sons will continue that tradition) and he goes to work at the Clark and Coats mill as a machinist making sewing machines. At this point he has five children and will have three more in Paisley. There’s a shortage of housing and the growing family live in a 2 bedroom flat on McKerrell Street. Home ownership is not an option and no-one has cars so need to live near their workplace.
The family moves a couple of times, settling at 9 Lady Lane. In 1914 four of James’s sons are called up to serve and leave for the front in France. Luckily all come home but John McInnes Moffat, my grandfather has a shrapnel wound in his face and is sent to a military hospital in Edinburgh where he meets his future wife Lizzie Clark Millar b 1885 - or at least that’s how the story goes. The war ended in 1918 and it wasn’t until 1922 that John and Lizzie got married.
John was a baker and along with one of his brothers (tow were butchers) worked at the Provident Co-operative store on Causeyside which was a huge red brick department store with a first floor food court like Harrods.
As I mentioned, housing is short and even more so with the return of soldiers from the war. The Homes for Heroes movement is started in Scotland and homes are built for veterans. John and Lizzie move from a crowded flat to a beautiful new twin home with a garden in the east side of Paisley.
Sadly their first child Margaret dies of pneumonia at age 5. Her younger brother James Fairlie Moffat b 1925 (my dad) grows up on Sherwood Avenue and goes to Paisley Grammar School, a prestigious private school nearby. He leaves school at 16 and goes to work for the Glasgow Herald as a journalist and serves in the Air Force cadets at the end of WWII. He meets my mum in Edinburgh at a tea dance and they start married life in Edinburgh and come back to Paisley where I was born in 1957 - at Barshaw Park Maternity Hospital [ far right on map]
Creating the map was such an intense experience - learning about my ancestors and where they lived. loved, and worked. I based the map on a historic map of Paisley that was colored in pink and green. Only the main roads and streets that my family lived on are depicted.
The Moffat clan motto is “We strive for better things” and this played out over the course of our history. Each generation strived to work hard and create a better life for their family. My dad jumped from the working class to the middle class through his mother Lizzie’s inheritance from her great uncle William which enabled him to go to Paisley Grammar School.
My dad always told me “The world is your oyster” and gave me big ideas to think about.