Alice Mackay

Alice is enigmatic.  Like her mother, Mary Ann Lawrence, she is difficult to find for a period.  Unlike her mother, she is easy to locate after 1871.  She seems always to have been called Alice but the surname is problematic.  She appears to have been Alice Mackay for most of her life, mainly because she married Daniel Mackay but also because her father was Thomas Mackay, a merchant seaman.  This is strange, though not unique, in that her mother never married her father but she carried his name.  I can think of at least three or four others in the tree in the same situation of illegitimate children carrying the father's name (Allan Old 1875's son Allan, George Bruce and Mary Finlayson for starters).  Things got a little complicated when her mother married a different sailor, Fredrik Johansen (elsewhere noted as Fred Johnstone) in 1871, as she seemingly became Alice Johnston as indicated in husband Daniel's death record.  She was back to being Alice Mackay at her wedding in 1877 but there's a new twist in her own death record.  She is named Alice Knowles Mackay.  Where did the Knowles come from?  It is not mentioned elsewhere.  Add to all of this that she may have been Alice Lawrence before her mother decided to call her Mackay as a face-saving exercise and we have a web of intrigue when we are trying to locate her in the records.

Certainly we have a problem locating her birth and her first census in 1861 but having tried all sorts of variations I have to accept that maybe she was on a boat somewhere in 1861!  I am unaware of any siblings she may have had which could have helped in locating her but with her mother's mysterious past just because I don't know doesn't mean there weren't any.  Remembering that her mother Mary Ann was in a penitentiary as a fallen woman four years before Alice's projected birth date, who knows the circumstances of Alice's early days?  Her birth should be easy enough to find as she stated it more than once as being in Woodside, a little village which is now swallowed by Aberdeen, and with pretty consistent and reliable ages in all censuses and records her birth can be estimated as being in 1855 or 1856, which brings her into the modern era of compulsory registration.  It's just not there though but with a choice of Lawrence and Mackay and all spelling variations and just the possibility that she was a year older and therefore not in the compulsory range, there is scope for it to remain undiscovered or even non-existent.

By the age of 15 Alice was a kitchen maid in Chalmer's Hospital in Edinburgh, living in the hospital, i.e. away from her mother, who can't be found, and a short stroll from where future husband Daniel lived.  No doubt they met in the area.  By the time she married she was a milliner, which means that she made hats, possibly selling them as well, no doubt for someone else.  Two of her children would follow her into shop assistant positions (clothier's and china), which would be respectable jobs especially if they were in some of the Princes Street stores which were in their heyday.  Daniel's sister was a dressmaker so possibly that had an influence on her choice of career and maybe created an opening for her.

For someone who started off in difficult circumstances she seems to have ended up quite well off.  A four-roomed house in Angle Park Terrace was pretty respectable and she was in Balcarres Street, Morningside, after Daniel's death, eventually ending her days in what one assumes was a detached cottage in Currie, going by the fact her home had a name, "Weonga".  It's a strange name and seems to be Australian in origin but I haven't found out any more about it.