Two follow-ups

Today someone has kindly posted a comment on my blog called A baker in Australia which I published on 17th September 2009. It contains new and useful information for our clan archives, particularly about George Robinson McIlhagga the eldest son of Samuel Robinson McIlhagga and Jane McNeice. It mentions a firm of glaziers in Belfast called FaircoMcIlhagga which has not been mentioned before in this blog. If anyone has more information to add I would be glad to hear from them.

Also today one of my regular correspondents in Australia has sent me two e-mails about my last blog with a number of supporting documents. After examining the relevant migration and marriage documents it is clear that William McIlhagga and his brother Liston were the children of Andrew McIlhagga and Sarah Wilson. However there is an interesting variation between two spellings of Sarah's middle name. Their marriage record spells it Patillo but her birth record, in Edinburgh, Scotland, spells it Pattali. This birth record shows us her parents' names, John Wilson a Hammerman and Liston Bonsof - this last name is difficult to read. Thus we have the origin of the first name of the eldest son of Andrew and Sarah. The reference in my last blog to Mrs. C. McIlhagga as the mother of Liston and William appears to have been a mistake on a migration document which was picked up by the Winnipeg Free Press in 1945. The only other explanation for this 'error' conceivably may have had something to do with Andrew their father returning in 1938 to live in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. Interestingly at that point he declared his age to be 42 when in fact it was 49 - for what reason we do not know.