Dorothea Hardie

When my mother, Jean Anderson, named her daughter Dorothy she had no idea it was a family name.  However, she had a great-aunt Dorothy and a great-great-granny named Dorothy, the lady featured here.  Having said that, her name was variously Dorothy, Dorothe, Dorothea, Dortha and Dora and I have no idea how she pronounced her name.  She was named after her own granny Dorothy Davidson, born 1725, who added Dorrittie and Dorrittee to the spellings.  That lady is the earliest carrier of the name I have so far located in our tree.  Just to round off this section, Dorathy, Dorotha and Dorothia are other variations in the family twigs.

Dorothea was a grocer in 1871 but as there are no Post Office Directories for Linlithgow available to check I can't see if she had the business all her adult life or where the shop was.  If we assume that the shop was below the house, which seems a sensible guess then it would have been roughly opposite where Cabrelli's is now.

Dorothea had a serious problem in her later life when her husband started to go insane.  The reports detailed on his page show what she had to put up with.  Obviously it eventually became too much for her and he had to be institutionalised but he returned a year and a half later and with no record of his being cured, just "relieved", and no record of him having been returned to the asylum she must have cared for him herself.