Glenboig to Maryhill

This is my final bite of the 1911 Scottish Cherry. The last household was in Maryhill - George and Isabella McIlhago and children Margaret (19), Harry (18) and James (14). Interestingly George was a 'Railway Constable', presumably in the early Railway Police Force. Harry was also employed by the Railway Company as a Bookings Clerk. The family had moved to Maryhill from Glenboig near Coatbridge in North Lanarkshire where the first two children had been born and where George had been a miner. However, it was when the children were very young for they are all there in Maryhill in the previous 1901 Census. It must have been quite a change from small rural town to large city. In the 1901 Census Harry had been mis-transcribed as Harvey and Margaret had the second name initial B. In fact both she and James had the second name Boak.

One of the interesting things for us is where George originated in Ireland. If he was 48 in 1911, his birth year was 1863 and the only Irish George McIlhago (sometimes McIlhaggo) I have on record is George Gardner McIlhago who in 1890 married Isabella Scott Boak in New Monkland, Lanark. Clearly from the evidence of second names we have the right couple. Their son James Boak was to marry Margaret Watson Mackenzie on 25th February 1927 in Hope Street Free Church of Scotland, Glasgow. George's father, back in Ireland, was Henry who had farmed in the townland of Maxwell's Walls in the parish of Connor. His mother was Agnes, daughter of Francis Gardiner a neighbouring farmer in Castlegore. Henry's father and grandfather were also Henry, each farming in the same townland, in a family line which consistently used the 'old' spelling of McIlhaggo, back to the end of the eighteenth century and maybe earlier.