Kirk and Chapel
Paisley Abbey
The Moffat line has been Presbyterian (Church of Scotland) as far back as I can trace for 300 years. Alexander Moffat c. 1728 lived in Airdrie, Lanarkshire and his son Alexander was baptized on Sunday May 16 1762.
Only two people on the Moffat side of the family tree were not Presbyterian. My grandmother Lizzie Clark Millar 1885 was Episcopalian before she got married. Her mother got married in the Free Church in Meigle, Perth, but Lizzie spent her childhood in England where she went to a Church of England school.
My great great grandmother Eliza Ann Moore 1832 came to Paisley from County Antrim in Ireland and had grown up in the Church of Ireland.
On the Robertson side there were immigrants from Ireland. The Northern people were Protestant and the Southern were Catholic. (Ireland didn’t become an independent country until 1922). The chart below shows everyone in the 6 generations and their denomination according to where they were baptized.
The most interesting thing I discovered was that in Leith it was quite common for people to marry outside of their denomination. My mother and her grandmothers were all raised differently, switching between Protestant and Catholic every generation back to the mid 1800s according to the fathers’ preference (in my family).
Mixed marriages were frowned on by the churches but pretty common in the big cities during the Industrial Revolution where people lived together in tenement housing and worked alongside each other in the factories and docks.
In the Roman Catholic Church people who wanted to marry a Protestant could be refused sacred rites or at worst be excommunicated. The official church policy fluctuated over the years depending on Papal decrees. From 1917 to 1970 it was really strict.
In 1842 the Presbyterian Church split and the Free Church, a reformed branch, emerged, The split lasted until 1929. Peter McCabe c 1823, a young gas fitter from Ireland married Jane Moffat c. 1820 (no relation to the other Moffats) once in St Mary’s Cathedral and again at the Leith Free Church. He was covering all bases.
You can see from the chart that there are fewer Presbyterians on the Robertson side. The Robertsons and Hunters were originally from the Edinburgh area and they were Presbyterian (Church of Scotland) going back to the 1600s.
Our family attended St Ninian’s Church in Corby
To see any individual’s details you can clink on the link to Ahnentafel Chart at the top of the blog in the header OR click on My Family Tree and search in Tree Search.