Robert Hughes Delves Further into His Past

Robert Hughes, great-nephew of Lionel Britton, reports:

'This is a very welcome record. It shows the old lady, Elizabeth Harding herself; in the last month or so of her life.

'With her is Catherine Erskine Nimmo, the older sister after whom Elizabeth Smith named her daughter Catherine Erskine, (my great-great-grandmother); and a whole bunch of Nicholsons including (almost certainly) Robert Nimmo Nicholson who later married Elizabeth Mary Smith, and died even before she did.

'Apart from the fact that this is the first great-great-great-great-grandparent I have found on any of the census forms, (and I'll be lucky if it isn't the last!), it's also the first record from Ann St that has come up in that year, and believe me I've looked for lots of them, to the point where I was beginning to suspect that some stuff was missing.

'Also bizarre is that I wasn't searching on Nimmo, (it wouldn't have come up: the Ancestry database suffers from what seems like a pretty crude search system and won't allow wild cards in a surname until after 3 characters, so you couldn't simply search on N***o).

'It was actually Nicholson which did come up: I was hoping to locate the records for Auchenblain itself, as it's still not clear what happened to the property after Thomas Nimmo died, and his heir Dr Robert died in Messina, Sicily two years later. Scrolling through the results I noticed the one for Greenock and had a look at it. It turned out to be right even though I was under the impression that Ann St was in the Middle parish, so that's something else to be looked into, as all the Thomas Nimmo/Elizabeth Harding children were born in the Middle Parish.

'Taking this at face value, Elizabeth Nimmo née Harding was born in Scotland rather than anywhere else, somewhere between June 7th 1756 and June 6th 1761.

'This is very much what we might have expected, but it tends to rule out other theories, e.g.: she was a rather older, previously married woman; she was a teenage bride; she was born in India, Ireland or England, (or even...Wales!). Notably, it almost certainly rules out that she was a Greenock girl and that the reason Thomas Nimmo came to Greenock was on account of her being a native of that town.

'In the last couple of days I've also found two separate wills for brothers of Thomas Nimmo. John, whose birth is on record, (1773-1819), and William for whom we only have the evidence in his will: he died in 1814. In each will there is copious evidence of the relationship between them and Robert Nimmo of Auchenblain, their father, and Jean Nimmo, their mother, as well as sisters Agnes and Charlotte.

'Perhaps there are missing parish records for Kirkoswald, and it is even possible that the elusive marriage record for Thomas Nimmo and Elizabeth Harding is among them. There may be sixteen childen of Robert and Jean, and it is not totally impossible that one unrecorded daughter married into the Erskines and provided the link to the Earls of Mar and Kellie which Uncle Lionel claimed.

'If not there, the only other conceivable link which would match his claim exactly would be through Elizabeth Harding...

'So we'll have to go on trying to find out who she was!'

Robert Burns’s Schooldays

Robert Hughes posts a correction, and an apology:

Several sources are clear that Robert Burns, the Scottish Bard, went to school in Kirkoswald at 17 years of age, and as he was born in 1759, my previous post obviously was wrong on a vital date; so humble pie to be eaten and spank me if you can catch me.

Burns died at 37 years of age after a prodigiously (re)productive career: some accounts suggest that 'By the end of his short life he was to have fathered fourteen children, nine of them out of wedlock, by six different mothers'.

He also gave Scotland hundreds of poems and songs, interweaving traditional tunes, an original use of vernacular dialect, and his own colourful observations of nature; human, animal and social.

Was 'Rabbie' Burns a subversive or a social climber?

Did he make accessible the Scots dialect, or slaughter the English language?

Was he a virile perpetuator of his race and genes, or a vile wanton rake?

Did he deserve an Oscar or an ASBO?

Controversial however he may be, there is a more prosaic question: did he know my ancestors?

He was an almost exact contemporary of my great-great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Nimmo, who was born in the parish of Kirkoswald less than a year before Burns. It might be a stretch to suppose that Thomas could have attended school with Rabbie, but there were enough younger siblings to make it likely that at least one of them studied with him, and in any case it is impossible to believe he did not know of the Nimmos of Auchenblain, whatever may have been his opinion of them.
One Burns-related website tells of a Jean Kennedy, a ‘gentlewoman’ who was running a pub, and William Fergusson inherited Auchenblain by marrying a Jean Kennedy.

Henceforth there is a cascade of names which seems to resonate between the Burns story and that of my Nimmo ancestors, see The Burns Encyclopedia. This link handily indexes many of Burns’s friends and acquaintances.

There are many Fergussons, (and Fergusons), and then Erskines, and Miss Erskine Nimmo.

A rather striking record from the Scotland census of 1861 shows the following people at 9 Brisbane St, Greenock:

Robert Candlish, aged 16, born in St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh. (A James Candlish was a boyhood friend of Burns, and indeed a best friend.)

Elizabeth Mary Chalmers, aged 32. (This unfortunate woman was to die a month later, and it seems likely that the census achieved a snapshot of a gathering at her deathbed. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Smith, neé Nimmo.)

Richard Chalmers, also aged 32, born in St Cuthbert’s Edinburgh, who was an English teacher. (Four Chalmers are listed in the index, including a close Ayrshire friend of Burns.)

Thomas C. Chalmers, aged 14, a ‘scholar’, born in St Cuthbert’s Edinburgh, described as a ‘brother’, so possibly a young brother of Richard.

Elizabeth Smith, ‘factor’s wife’, aged 62. (My great-great-great-grandmother. She was born Elizabeth Nimmo in 1796, and the little porkie-pie about her age was typical of ladies in her day. On her marriage in 1825 she was approaching 30, and it would have been natural to shave off three years or so. Her daughter and her sister were both called Catherine Erskine, and her grandson Arthur Britton gave Harding as a middle name to his own son. There is no other known candidate to be Elizabeth Nimmo at the relevant time.)

A Catherine Saw and an Agnes Saw were servants in the household.

Apart from Catherine and Agnes Saw, all the others had surnames which figure in the Robert Burns story.

Elizabeth Nimmo of course was a Smith by marriage: to my great-great-great-grandfather James Smith, born in Birmingham. Researching someone of that name is a bit like looking for the third nematode on the left in the Jurassic ooze.

However, another very great friend of Robert Burns was James Smith, a linen draper, and although this guy died young in Jamaica, it is perfectly possible that other family members later appeared in Birmingham.

James Smith of Birmingham was normally described as a ‘factor’, and I would welcome an exact estimation of what that signified at the era in question, but his son Frederick Sutherland Smith is in the 1871 census as a ‘factor and agent in cloth trade’. At the time he was occupying Wickhamford Manor with his own large family, and that property is still notable today as a large country hotel; so he was either going through a purple patch in the cloth trade or doing a nifty line in house-sitting.

Where did Elizabeth Nimmo meet James Smith? I doubt she was down in Birmingham to bask in the bright lights. Her daughter Elizabeth Mary, (whom I have mentioned as suffering an untimely death in Greenock), was first married to Robert Nimmo Nicholson, the son of a farmer near Greenock and his wife Abigail McRae…yes you’ve got it, Nimmo!

They liked to keep it in the family these people, and that is why it seems so probable that James Smith was actually of a Scottish family himself, and perhaps the same family as the James Smith of Robert Burns’s acquaintance. Certainly the trade seems to be the same.

(A small aside: Lionel Britton, who was Elizabeth Nimmo’s great-grandson, wrote Hunger and Love, which could be seen as a tirade against trade; yet not only was James Smith unquestionably in trade, (cloth or not), but another of Lionel’s great-grandfathers – James Britton, also of Birmingham – was in trade, the only doubt being whether he was a leathercutter, an ironmonger or both; and yet another great-grandfather – Samuel Thomas Senior of Redditch – had needed sixteen bodyguards to protect him from stonethrowing townspeople after he had industrialised the needle-manufacturing process there. Trade, trade, trade…it wasn’t about what other people were doing, it was about what his own people were doing.)

Was there a circle involved with Robert Burns who still cohered, (hung out together, if you prefer,) nearly seventy years after the Bard’s death? Or is it just a coincidence that all these names crop up together, and that the common thread of Ayrshire seems to link them?

Robert Burns experts to the rescue here please!

Auchenblain, and the family legend

Robert Hughes posts on his family history:

My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Robert Nimmo the Younger of Auchenblain had at least nine children, of whom perhaps the first was Thomas, born 21 February 1758, who later became an apothecary in Greenock.

Thomas was the father of at least eight children himself, the youngest daughter being Elizabeth Nimmo, my great-great-great-grandmother, and the great-grandmother of Lionel Britton, the ‘lost genius of the nineteen-thirties’, who is now receiving renewed attention.

Auchenblane, (which seems to be the preferred modern spelling, another alternative used in the past being Auchinblain), is a property at GB Grid ref. NS 261 079, a mile or so east of Kirkoswald, Ayrshire, in the direction of Maybole.

A Google Earth image shows the property today unchanged from its appearance on a map of 1859, so some things have endured in 150 years of turbulence!

Thomas Nimmo died at Greenock on 3 August 1834, according to the Greenock Advertiser of 7 August 1834, by courtesy of the Watt Museum, Greenock.

Fowler’s Commercial Directory of 1831–32 mentions him as a ‘druggist’ at 63 Dalrymple St, Greenock, with a house in Ann St.

His wife was Elizabeth Harding, although a birth record for one of their children gives her as ‘Hardy’.

Looking at the site Scotland’s People, it would seem that in the eighteenth century ‘Harding’ was almost invariably rendered as ‘Hardie’ or ‘Hardy’, while later the form ‘Harding’ emerges more commonly; or Scotland was invaded by Hardings around the turn of the century, and someone needs to show evidence of that before I would believe it.

My great-uncle Lionel Erskine Nimmo Britton used to assert that he was a fourth cousin of the Earl of Mar and Kellie, so was he?

His grandmother Catherine Erskine Smith was the daughter of Elizabeth Nimmo, and almost certainly named for Elizabeth’s elder sister Catherine Erskine Nimmo.

The Erskines are the family of the Earls of Mar and Kellie, but where is the connection?

It does not seem to be on the Nimmo of Auchenblain line, as none of the likely parents of Thomas Nimmo seem to trace back to the Erskines, but these Ayrshire burial records from Kirkoswald are interesting:

'Robert Nimmo, formerly residing in Auchenblain, died 11th May 1786, Junior/Younger.'

'Robert Nimmo, formerly residing in Auchenblain, died 3rd April 1806, Old/Elderly man'.

Did Robert Nimmo the Elder outlive Robert the Younger by twenty years?

Where then is the elusive Erskine connection?

Elizabeth Harding herself is a complete mystery, as there appear to be no records of her marriage to Thomas Nimmo, or of her birth. She died in Greenock on 19 July 1841, but the 1841 census was taken a few weeks earlier, and there is no trace of her. Furthermore, her daughter Catherine Erskine Nimmo died apparently unmarried on 28 July 1848 at 19 Brougham St, Greenock, but there is no trace of her either. There are some known issues with the 1841 census, but they do not affect this area at all. What does happen very frequently with the census and indeed other records, is that there is a mistranscription; or alternatively people are just not called what we expect, e.g. Thomas Nimmo’s eldest daughter Jean married John Nicholson in 1804, but her marriage record makes her Jane.

(On the other side of my family there is a record of a Jane McCallum, who was my Auntie Jean!).

Could anyone shed light on the mystery of Elizabeth Harding?

There remains the small chance that the link to the Erskines is through Auchenblain, but in any case the story of this property is interesting in itself.

It appears to have once belonged to the Fergussons, but the testament of Thomas Nimmo, recorded on 11 Dec 1834 at Paisley Sheriff Court, suggests that he owned a good part of it at that date.

He leaves, to his son Robert Nimmo, M.D., (who in fact tragically died at Messina, Sicily a mere two years later):

'the forty shilling land of Easter Auchenblain, the ten shilling land of M[---?] and the thirty shilling and fourpenny land of Rottonmiss and Mosside presently possessed by John Nicholson with the Mansionhouse of Auchenblain and h[aile?] houses, luggings, yards, Parks, P[arks?], mosses, muirs, meadows, ...'

He also leaves a hundred pounds a year to his wife Elizabeth Harding, (interesting that she should be named in this fashion: but I have examined the notion that she was in fact married to someone else, and doubt if there’s anything in that), stipulating also that out of the estate his daughters should each be paid a thousand pounds, (and there are four named), apart from the eldest, Jean, who is separately provided for as she is married to John Nicholson, who ‘possesses’ part of Auchenblain.

Without hearing from a Scottish property lawyer who wishes to wade through the eleven pages of the will itself, I surmise that Thomas conceived himself to be a man of substance, even if he wasn’t.

This account of the parish of Kirkoswald from 1837 is interesting.

Note that ‘Dr Nimmo’s heirs’ have property worth about 80 pounds a year, which doesn’t seem much in relation to the disbursements required by Thomas’s will; but perhaps those very provisions depleted the resources of the estate?

I would love to hear from the present owners of Auchenblane, (are you relatives?), and from anyone who can shed light on the issues raised here.

Are there any Erskine anoraks who can tell us how Elizabeth Nimmo was descended from that family?

Other families associated with Auchenblain besides Fergusson (William Fergusson is said to have inherited the property by marriage to the daughter of a John Kennedy), are Leggat or Legat, Hendry, and of course Nicholson.

Note also the Burns connection in the Kirkoswald link. The old Scottish Bard was at school in Kirkoswald in 1786, and knew a Miss Erskine Nimmo in Edinburgh. We suspect Robbie Burns knew the Nimmo family; can anyone corroborate this?