Chris Patondiscusses how more specialist records can add additional context to a family history, enabling you to research the locations your ancestors once lived and worked, and demonstrates how you too can undertake such a project with a case study
Within our family history pursuits we will inevitably come across particular locations within which our ancestors resided for generations. Whilst a parish history may provide a useful backdrop to the evolution of an area across time, the examination of both basic and more specialist records for such locations can often add further understanding to the family narrative.
Within my own ancestry, my surname line, Paton, can be traced back to the parish of Dunbarney in Perthshire in the mid 18th century, with the strong circumstantial possibility that prior to this they hailed from Auchtergaven parish, a little further north in the county. However, from 1779 to 1878 several generations of my direct line ancestors lived within the royal burgh of Perth. The earliest was my five times great-grandfather John Paton
(1745-1820), a handloom weaver and salmon fisherman, with the most recent being Joan Fenwick, formerly Paton, maiden surname Woodroffe (1804-1878), the mother of my two times greatgrandfather, William Hay Paton.
The starting point of Chris’s research
Two main narrative topics dominated my family’s time in Perth. The first was that they were heavily involved in the handloom weaving industry within the burgh. The second was that for some fifty years they were based in a weaver’s cottage in a small suburb called Carr’s Croft, located within the Craigie district close to the town centre. Whilst studying for the University of Strathclyde’s postgraduate certificate and diploma courses in Genealogical Studies from 2006-2008, I took the opportunity to explore both of these topics, creating projects to try to find out more about my family’s time within the burgh.
Creating a database of records to research (& background reading)
My starting point was to examine the history of the weavers over the course of seventy-five years from 1770-1844, and to create a database of records for weavers to help facilitate this, from various sources.
Through background reading I learned that in the 1770s linen weaving was the predominant industry initially, with cotton th
