People and their damn nicknames. Don’t they know enough to not use a nickname on an official document, like the census? Isabella is “Bell.” Robert Nelson is “Robert” in one census record and “Nelson” in another. And “Jane” was sometimes a nickname for “Jean.”
I think, maybe, my great-great-grandmother was also named Jean. She appears as Jane in one census record but as Jean, in another … which would make more sense, right? Ancestry.com says she was born somewhere around 1845, got married in 1866, and had her first daughter, Margaret, in 1873. Not having children until she was 28 is a little unusual but maybe Margaret was their first child to live past infancy. And she did not have my great-grandmother, Jean, until 1886.
While I am grateful that Grandma assembled the album at all, it is frustrating that she did not provide any more information. I am pretty sure this is Jean Murray Riddell, my father’s great-grandmother. How could it be my father’s great-great-grandmother, which is what Grandma’s note suggests? That would mean this woman was born in 1825. Photography was not invented until the 1840s, right? No, this has to be Jean Murray, mother of Jean Riddell Marr, grandmother of Jeanne Marr Lillard, great-grandmother of Patrick Lillard, and great-great-grandmother of me and my sister.
Even though Jean is not smiling, exactly, in this picture, she looks like she wanted to smile. She doesn’t have that stern, dour expression that is evident in so many of the pictures from this era. I guess for the time they had to sit still for the picture to be taken, holding a big smile was not realistic.
There was an address on the birth record for Margaret, the first child of Andrew and Jean Murray Riddell: No. 1 Main Street in Glasgow. This is what Google maps shows me, when I put in that address:
Ha. Not likely to glean anything from this image, 150 years later. So, I searched on the address and found this picture, from the early 1900s:
If Andrew and Jean could look over my shoulder right now, they would probably say I was wildly off base and their street did not look anything like this. But it is sort of nice to imagine it, anyway.
I looked up what was happening in the world in 1866, the year Andrew and Jean married at 21 years old. I know that the United States was in the midst of recovering from the Civil War, passing (but not ratifying for another two years) the 14th amendment automatically making people born on U.S. soil into U.S. citizens, and suffering under the disastrous presidency of Andrew Johnson. In the UK, the Reform Act 1867 gave working class men the right to vote, which would have affected Andrew – and by extension, Jean, who did not get the right to vote. I like to think Andrew would have exercised his new right to vote.
Note: I was looking for an explanation of the Reform Act of 1867, specifically for some mention of the fact that only men were allowed to vote, as “heads of household.” Most sites said, “working classes” were enfranchised. In fact, only half the “working classes” were enfranchised, if women were not allowed to vote. I know, I know, this is not surprising or shocking, but I am still allowed to be annoyed.