These are two photos of my 2nd great-grandmother, Margaret (Simpson) Grassie, or Maggie, as she was called by friends and family. She was born in 1856 at Edinburgh, Scotland, the fourth child of Alexander and Elizabeth Simpson.
I remember the feeling of delight three decades ago when I first discovered the family in the 1851 Scotland Census. After ordering the microfilm from Salt Lake City and manually scrolling page by page, I was about to give up when miraculously the Simpsons family popped up on the page. They were living at 4 Society Close, one of the narrow passages that branched off from Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Alexander Simpson was listed as a Private Family Coachman, and along with his wife, Elizabeth, they had three children at the time: Alexander (9), Barbara (5), and Jean (11 months). Also living with them was an elderly 74-year-old woman, a lodger. Maggie would be born 4 years later. From that moment on I was hooked on genealogy and, though most records have now been digitized and are available at the touch of a button, the euphoria of finding a record and solving a mystery remains the same.
Maggie would have been about three years old when her family emigrated to Hamilton, Ontario, so it’s unlikely that she would have retained many memories of her Scottish homeland. While researching this story, I found a pencil sketch of Society Close dated 1850, and I imagine that one of the apartments could well have been my ancestors’. Is that their laundry hanging to dry from the third floor window? Or was their home the one that jutted out over the narrow walkway between the tenement buildings? Who were their neighbours, their friends? They were Presbyterian, so did they attend the nearby St. Giles Cathedral on Sundays? Why did they leave? Understanding the conditions of the time reveals the likely tale.
Edinburgh’s Old Town was overcrowded. In the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, the population had more than doubled, from 83,000 to 202,000, mostly with working class people like the Simpsons who had arrived from the country to find work. If their city dwelling was anything like the average home, the Simpson family would have shared one room, perhaps 150 square feet in size, “with no fresh running water to drink or wash in and no toilets.”[1] Given such conditions, it’s no wonder that outbreaks of disease - typhus and cholera - were commonplace and mortality rates high in the city. Alexander would have worked for a family with money, a position that could pay the bills; but there was no room for advancement for himself or his children. Undoubtedly, long term opportunities were greater and life was healthier in Canada.
In about 1859 they arrived in the growing town of Hamilton, Ontario, population 19,000, where many other Scots had settled. Alexander Sr. found work as a labourer and Alex Jr. trained as a tinsmith, while the children all went to school. Two more sons, George and John, were born there. Though life was difficult, I believe that Maggie had a happy childhood with good parents, for she turned out to be a jolly, kind-hearted mother, aunt, and grandmother.
I won’t tell the rest of her life now, but I will share one story. Some thirty years ago I interviewed one of my late grandmother’s cousins, Deta Ross, who shared memories of visiting her Grandmother Grassie at Duncan, BC in the 1920s. Deta gave me a small creamer jug that she had inherited after her grannie died. The body forms a ripe, red tomato, the green stem is the handle, and the leaves form a scalloped edge for the spout. It’s charming, with only a few small nicks that reveal its age of more than a century.
I keep it in a cabinet next to the TV, and have rarely thought of it until this week, when something happened to bring it into focus. While working on a different family project and looking through a digitized copy of the 1913-14 Eaton’s catalogue, I came across a page that stopped me in my tracks and immediately filled me with a sense of joy. It was Grannie Grassie’s creamer jug - very small on the page, but undoubtedly the same. But what made me grin even more was the price… just 15 cents![2]
Grannie Maggie Grassie died fifty years before I was born, but experiencing a reminder of her cheery life brought a smile to my face and lifted me all the same.
Sources:
[1] Truly Edinburgh. "The 1861 Census: Awful conditions in Edinburgh and Glasgow," https://trulyedinburgh.com/scotland-history/1861-census/
[2] Eaton’s 1913-14 catalogue. https://archive.org/details/eatons19131400eatouoft/page/n271/mode/2up?view=theater
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