When I moved to the UK in 2009 I did so on the grace of my paternal grandmother. Commonwealth citizens who have a grandparent that were born in the UK qualify for a unique kind of Ancestry visa that makes emigration easier. You need all sorts of birth and marriage certificates to prove your visa and my collection of those materials lead to a big hole in my understanding.
My grandmother was born in Glasgow. She was born to an unwed mother who worked in service, a woman named Annie Grant, my grandmother was given her father’s last name (Ann Allan Grant) and sent up north to Thurso to be raised by her paternal grandmother. She was told her whole life that her mother had died shortly after her birth. We couldn’t find a death certificate for her in Glasgow at the time.
The internet is a wonderful thing though and I learned what I could about my great-Grandfather John Allan and wrote in Letters from the Gardeners Cottage Vol 3. about the impact on me of finding out how he had travelled from the docks of Gourock to Canada on an Empire Visa, all alone in his early 20s. The same embarkment point I would be using over and over to reach the Gardeners Cottage where I lived.
But Annie Grant was missing. The first time I was in Glasgow I went and stood on the street in front of the house where she gave birth to my grandmother in 1923. I wanted to close the circle with my presence.
I thought about what must have been at risk for her at the time to be unwed and in service—everything. I ached that she never knew the little girl she delivered would go on to bring (we’re at about 4 more now) generations of people into this world that had some of her in them. I stood there because I somehow wanted her to feel some comfort across time if that’s possible, that we knew her name at least and she would be remembered.
Then this Monday morning an email ended the generations of mystery. A very thorough and distantly related man interested in weaving together lost stories like ours in his family tree, sent a note after two years of quiet.
Meet Annie Grant.
She didn’t die and no one knows what happened between her and John Allan—how the arrangements were made or their understanding. We have bits of paperwork puzzle pieces to sketch the outlines of a story.
She knew John for at least two years before my Grandmother was born as the 1921 census shows that he and his brother worked as ploughmen on her family farm in Kinkell Castle. Did they decide to go together to work in Glasgow?
We don’t know what happened to her in the immediate aftermath of giving birth. It’s not believed that she had any more children and she never married.
Later she ran The Victoria Hotel in Edinburgh with her little sister Jessie for most of her life. She travelled to Australia to visit her brother and that brought her on a journey across Canada in 1958 where she would have passed by her daughter (with her own family now including my Dad). All without knowing.
It’s mostly very sad that this had to happen at all—that society decided it was better to tell a young girl her mother had died than to deal with the ridiculous shame of being born outside of wedlock—and I wonder what that cost Annie, I know it cost my grandmother a lot.
But at least now it’s completely wonderful to gaze on her face while I think about it.
Oh my goodness! I can only imagine they both carried that emptiness their whole lives. Love that you've gotten some closure.
That’s an amazing story, Susie! Thanks for sharing it ❤️