Christina McLaren

We start off with quite an amazing twist.  In looking for Christina's birth the 1851 census suggested a birth date of 1812 or 1813.  One in 6 Jan 1811, to John McLaren & Isobel King, was the only one close and I therefore assumed this was the record, which read -

Kilmadock 1811 January 6th
John McLaren & Isobel King his spouse at Doune had a child baptized called Christian Wit John & David King both at Doune. The child was born the 27 December 1810

So when I found Christian Campbell with her husband James living next door to John and Isabel McLaren I automatically assumed she was living next door to her parents.  There was a snag though - they had a 25-30 year old daughter named Christian living with them!  She couldn't be single and living with her parents and married and living next door as well!  On further investigation there was another John Campbell breeding with another Isabel, Maxwell, in Kilmadock around the same time and although I couldn't find a Christian in their brood there certainly was space for one.  Christina's death record, when eventually found, confirmed that Isabel Maxwell was indeed her mother.  How incredible is that to find two girls born within a year of each other in the same town, both named Christian McLaren to parents named John and Isabel and living next door to each other? 

It might not be such a coincidence though.  I haven't done any further research on this but I suspect that the John McLarens could be cousins and may have been living next door to each other simply because they knew each other through family ties.  Otherwise it certainly is some coincidence.

Christina married James Campbell but the marriage only lasted twenty years until she was widowed, leaving her with a fairly young family to raise on her own although they all, including Christina herself, found jobs in the nearby Deanston Cotton Mill.  Things were to get worse though when between 1861 and 1871 the cotton industry collapsed, as mentioned on daughter Christina's page.  Things improved when the family moved to Clydeside where the boys became joiners and the girls became sewing machinists but something else very strange happened - each of the four children aged only seven years between censuses.  Had time travel been invented?  It would have been no surprise to find that Christina herself had only aged seven years as this was very common for women between censuses but she had absorbed the full ten years! Did she really not know what age her children were?

When her daughter Christina married George Bruce in 1878 both fathers were noted as deceased but neither mother was.  This is strange because Christina had died the previous year and this error had caused me problems in trying to locate her death, assuming it was after 1878.  Once I located it, it unlocked the parentage problem noted above.