MUTTONHALL, YARROW - A HOUSE THROUGH TIME

My first family history recording of Muttonhall, a shepherd's cottage in Yarrow, is in the 1901 Census, where Cameron and William (twin brothers of my great grandfather, Frank Anderson) lived and worked. Shortly after that, by 1903, my great grandparents, Frank and Helen, were living there and in 1904 my great uncle, Jim, was born at Muttonhall. The following year, my grandpa, Archie, was born there, but by the time of the 1911 Census the Anderson family had moved on to a farm near Hawick. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that the family residing in Muttonhall in 1911 was a shepherd and his wife and their 10 children - with the Census stating that the property had "only 2 rooms with one or more windows". Rather crowded I suspect).

Muttonhall is located approximately 4 miles north of the Selkirk to Moffat road. Turning off approximately 1 mile west of The Gordon Arms Hotel, at Craig Douglas Farm (and before you come to St Mary's Loch), it is reached by following the Douglas Burn northwards, passing both Craighope and Blackhouse.

The earliest mention of this cottage I have found to date, is from a book
published in 1902, titled “A History Of The Tweedie, or Tweedy, Family; A
Record Of Scottish Lowland Life & Character”. It states – "Something quite after the fashion of the good old days happened to Thomas Tweedie of Oliver in 1753. It seems that he had some difference with the Crawfurds of Muttonhall, and on the 10th July in that year they "insidiously and violently attacked" him as he was riding on the high road to Linton, a little to the North-east of Hairstanes".

The next mention is in the 1841 Census and from then to 1935, via various Census and Valuation Rolls, it is apparent that the cottage was always occupied by shepherds and their families (with the land owned by wealthy families such as the Tweedies and the Maxwell Stuart's of Traquair).

In July 2013, for no reason other than I thought it would be a good idea to walk to the cottage where my grandpa was born in 1905, I walked from our house in Peebles to Muttonhall and then on to The Gordon Arms. A total distance of just under 20 miles.

My journey that day is related in a separate blog - neilbee.blogspot.com

Not long after that, in early 2014, I contacted a past owner of Muttonhall who had compiled a photo album of the property and surrounding area and uploaded it to an online photobook web site (which my sister had randomly found). Tim Price, whose family had owned Muttonhall from 1982 to 2010 and had completely refurbished the cottage, mentioned that his aunt had made a painting of Muttonhall in 1987/88 and he forwarded to me a printed copy of this painting - which is probably as near as I will get to see of the original building. Here it is.

  

This month (April 2019), I thought I would see if there was any updated online information about Muttonhall. Nothing on any family history websites but I did notice that the sale of Muttonhall and surrounding forestry was mentioned on a couple of estate agents websites. It was being marketed as "The Blackhouse Forest Estate" and I contacted one of these agents and asked if they could send me a copy of their sales particulars, which they did in a glossy brochure.  Here is the front cover of said brochure, as well as a couple of other photos. And the estate agents also created a short video to accompany their sales pitch. This is also included below. And I should mention that the cost to purchase was over £1.8m!!

My great grandparents and grandpa could never have imagined the changes made to their old home! 

AND YET MORE PUBLICITY FOR JAMES HOGG!

Well I bought the local newspaper last Friday - the Peeblesshire News - and in the inside front page was an article taken from another newspaper, the Border Telegraph.

The headline said that there were plans to mark the birth of the Ettrick Shepherd, as next year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of James Hogg.

A Dr Hunter of Stirling University and the Ettrick and Yarrow Community Development Company are getting together to promote Hogg's work and organise events and celebrations in the Scottish Borders during 2020. Local people and businesses will be encouraged to get involved.

Dr Hunter is a Senior Lecturer of English Studies and is quoted as saying that "It is really important to celebrate James Hogg as he is one of the great literary geniuses of the 19th Century, whose work is just as relevant now as it once was".

I look forward to seeing what will be arranged but in the meantime the full newspaper article is undernoted.

GREAT UNCLE RICHARD BYERS - THE STORY SPREADS!

About a month ago, I received a comment on one of my posts. This related to great uncle Richard Byers, who was killed in action in the Great War, and was from someone who was involved with a project at Langholm Academy.

Because Richard was born in the catchment area (Rowanburnfoot near Canonbie) of Langholm Academy, they wished to include Richard in their "Remembering My Soldier" project, which had commenced in 2017. One of its' aims was to create a memorial book, to be retained at the school, with details of all the men from the catchment area who had fallen in the Great War - and a total of 264 were currently known.

A page in this book would be dedicated to each soldier, including as much information as was available, and I was asked if they could use the photo and some detail from my blog post in compiling this page for their book. I replied absolutely no problem.

I was subsequently forwarded a copy of the aforementioned page - and here it is.

A CRITIQUE BY BILLY CONNOLLY OF ONE OF MY COUSIN'S NOVELS!!

In an article written for Penguin Books, in October 2018, Billy Connolly provided a suggested reading list, and of the 12 books he listed, one of them was the undernoted - written by my cousin (six times removed).

For a young Billy Connolly, the library was his salvation. He discusses his love of literature and how it has accompanied him through his adult life.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

"Now, here’s a character! James Hogg was a shepherd from a village in the Borders called Ettrick. They call him the Ettrick Shepherd. In fact, I think somebody once called him the Electric Shepherd! I was first attracted to Hogg when I read a quote by him in a bookshop in Inverness. He said, ‘I spent most of my youth trying to lose my innocence and succeeded only in finding a higher form of innocence.’ I read that and I thought, Oh, I like you! It felt like he was writing about me. Because with all the reading I was doing, and the playing instruments, and trying to make something of myself and change my life . . . I wasn’t becoming somebody else. I had thought I would become this other person, but all I was becoming was a bigger version of what I already was. Hogg wrote this work of genius, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justifed Sinner, about twins who are desperately unlike each other. You eventually – spoiler alert! – conclude that it is two sides of the same person. It’s like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but it came before it. It’s a brilliant book – and it was written by a wee shepherd! A few people have tried to make it into a film, and Peter McDougall did a good version for T V. James Hogg should be a much bigger figure in Scotland than he is. Everybody goes on about Robert Burns, which is great, but they don’t seem to have room to celebrate anybody else, which is a pity. So, go on! Read the Electric Shepherd!"

FOUND!! - A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY GREAT GRANDFATHER

Well, about 3 weeks ago and totally out of the blue, I had a message sent to me over Facebook Messenger, by a Leslie James Byers. It said "Hi Neil. If you come from Gretna you will be related to me. I had three uncles and half a dozen or more cousins there..." And that was it.

I replied saying that I was indeed born in Gretna and that my grandpa was George Byers. This was Leslie's uncle and it transpired that he (Leslie) was the son of my grandpa's younger brother, Marius. So Leslie was my dad's first cousin and mine, once removed. He is 81 years old and lives in Springfield, just outside Gretna.

Leslie also went on to say that he had messaged a Neil Byers in Lockerbie, who he thought was the grandson of John Thomson Byers (1903-1967), the youngest of the 12 children born to James Byers and Mary Jane Thomson. He had received no reply from this Neil Byers (who I had not heard of before).

Anyway, I thought, on the off chance, to ask Leslie if he had a photo of my great grandfather (his grandfather), James Byers, who is the only one of my eight great grandparents I don't have a photograph of. Amazingly, he replied within half an hour, through Messenger, with a photo of James and here it is.

My great grandfather, James Byers

And upon saying to Leslie that I had a dearth of photos from the Byers side of my family, he also sent me the following - 

My great grandmother, Mary Jane Thomson

Janet Glendinning Byers (1881-1962) (My grandpa's eldest sister and the oldest of the 12 children)

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Her brother and my great uncle, Robert Byers (1887-1951)

My great uncle, Thomas Joseph Byers (1893-1968)

Another photo of my great uncle, Richard Byers (1896-1917) (Killed in action in the Great War)

My great aunt, Mary Isabella Byers (1897-1962)

My grandfather, George Byers (1899-1960)

My great uncle, Marius Anderson Bell Byers, and wife Hilda Mary Davis, at the time of their Silver Wedding in 1953

As a matter of curiousity, I asked cousin Leslie, why his father had been named "Marius". He said that my great grandfather had worked at some stage for a Marius Bell, at "Broats Farm". (There are a few Broats Farms, but the most likely one, and the closest to Scotland, is near Penrith, Cumbria). Leslie added that Marius' middle name "Anderson" was after the Doctor who delivered him. His other middle name "Bell" is not from the Marius Bell mentioned above, but is the maiden name of his paternal grandmother.

My great uncle, John Thomson Byers (1903-1967) and his wife, Mary Helen McWhir, on their wedding day in 1928

And finally, this is a photograph of my first cousin, once removed, William James Johnston Byers. He fought in the Second World War, was captured by the Japanese and became a Prisoner of War. He worked and died on the building of the Burma Railway. (This was a 258 mile railway line between Thailand and Burma, built by the Empire of Japan in 1943 and more than 12,000 Allied prisoners died in the making of it).

William J.J. Byers (1912-1943)

Quite a treasure trove of family photographs and all as a result of my father's cousin randomly getting in touch.

THE MEANING OF THE BYERS SURNAME

I received an email today from Ancestry, inviting me to discover the origins of my surname. Clicking on a link in the email took me to the Ancestry website, and this informed me of the following (although please bear in mind the source of this information is from the "Dictionary Of American Family Names") - 

Byers Name Meaning:  Scottish and Northern English. Topographic name for someone who lived by a cattle-shed, Middle English byre, or a habitational name with the same meaning from any of several places named with Old English "byre"; for example, Byers Green in County Durham. Amercanised spelling of the German "Bayers".

And "Where is the Byers family from"?

The above is a map of England reflecting the preponderance of the Byers surname in the Census year of 1891. The recorded number of the Byers surname in the UK in 1891 was 1,266. The county with the largest number of Byers was Cumberland with 23% of the total; next was Lancashire with 14%; London with 10% and then Northumberland with 6%.

It's a pity there is no mention of the Scottish statistics. As far as I am aware the surname "Byers" originated from Dumfriesshire and indeed almost all my Byers ancestors came from that county. The relevant parishes within that county are - Lochmaben, Kirkmichael, Wamphray, Westerkirk, Canonbie and Gretna. All these parishes are located in either the middle or east of Dumfriesshire. A map of all the county's parishes is shown below.

AN UPDATE FROM ANCESTRY ON MY DNA TEST

A note on the Ancestry website states that "Since AncestryDNA first launched, we've continued to add new regions and improve the precision of your results. DNA research is a fast-paced, cutting-edge field, and you can expect us to make more advancements as DNA science evolves".

So today I happened to recheck my DNA results on the website and found that indeed my test results had been updated. They now look like this - 

So, to summarise, my Northern England side is still dominant, but not so much as it previously was. Down to 54% from 60%.

The Scotland side is up from 21% to 43%, although the "ethnicity estimate" previously only said "Scotland" and now says "Central Scotland & Ulster, Ireland and Northeast & Central Scotland".

Gone is mention of Scandinavia (8%) and West Europe (7%), and other regions constituting the other 4%, and there is now only mention of "Sweden" with 3%.

Quite a change in these results and in my own mind, probably more realistic with the England / Scotland split. Also quite specific, with the only other country mentioned in my DNA make-up being Sweden.

As mentioned in a previous post, the average Briton is 36% British, per the Ancestry DNA database, and it would now appear that I am 97% British. This would seem to be almost as British as you could get. But I daresay the results could change again?