James Mackay

You just feel that James would have been Jim or Jimmy or even Jamesie but not James.  Certainly in Tain there were so many people of the same names that nicknames were used in the official records and I feel that a name like James Mackay wouldn't be unique by a long chalk in Dornoch, therefore requiring distinction from the others.  His birth record can't be found due to a torn page in the records where it's clear that the details of three Mackay births have been lost from the register.  It's a pity that his marriage was before compulsory registration where his parentage would have been recorded and that his mother's surname wasn't known when his death was reported.  We do know they were Donald and Ann and that there is a family which meets all other criteria of time and place (Dornoch), including a gap for a birth between marriage and first recorded child three years later so I'm confident that he was the son of Donald Mackay, a sergeant in the Cameron Highlanders, and Ann Matheson.  Donald's story is so illustrious I've given him his own page!

Although we know James was born around 1824 he doesn't appear in the records until his marriage to Margaret Ross in Tain in 1850.  It says he was residing in Tain but we don't know when he moved from Dornoch with no positive identification in the 1841 census yet.  A look at the map shows that a courtship between Dornoch and Tain would have been hard to sustain because the five miles as the crow flies would become thirty miles by road round the as-yet unbridged Dornoch Firth or a long and dangerous row across it.  I therefore assume that he had moved across to Tain some time before the marriage.  James was younger than Margaret in all records but it varied between one and five years due to variations in census ages on both parts.  They were Gaelic speakers according to the censuses but whether this was their first language or not is unclear.  Obviously they would need English when they moved to Edinburgh but they still attended the Gaelic Church (see son Daniel's birth).

He was a joiner or carpenter all his life until the last census when there was a more specific occupation of cabinet maker.  By this time his son Donald was a Cabinet Maker's Manager for WS Brown and Sons of George Street and I think it doesn't require much imagination to conclude that nepotism found James a job in the St Vincent Street workshop.

This could have been a thank you from Daniel to his father for giving him an opportunity to succeed in life as his first step into a clerk's position wouldn't have been achieved without an education of sorts.  With only three children compared to the football-team-sized families around them there might have been less pressure to send him out to earn money at the first opportunity.  Whatever the situation, James's other children became a dressmaker and a shop assistant, fairly genteel occupations, suggesting a desire for his children to rise from the slums they were living in to a better life.

He did himself move to a better place, Rosemount Buildings, beside Daniel, again suggesting a close bond and mutual help, leaving behind the slums of the West Port to live the rest of his life in a much more pleasant environment. The link above shows a modern-day specification but it gives an indication of the layout of the flats.