LD 31 Happy Birthday

St George's Day was my grandfather Frederick Haynes'  birthday.   He died in the summer of  1966 , when I was only 13 and he was 76, born on this day in 1890.   He was a printer and publisher in Edinburgh until he retired just before he died and had lived in the city since 1929 when he came there from London and the printing and paper trade. 

But St George's Day is very appropriate for him, for his English roots were strong.   

His father, living in Abbots Langley near Watford (where my mother was also born in 1920) has his occupation listed in  the 1891 census (when Frederick was only 11 months old) as an "attendant in an asylum" and the woman Frederick eventually married, Jessie Adair,  is in the 1911 census as a "servant" in an asylum so one has to assume that they met through that connection.

Her grandfather is given in an earlier census return as being a "general labourer"  having been "born in Scotland" but I have failed so far in tracing that family back to Ireland, where I believe they came from.

His grandfather on his father's side is given in the 1851 census as also being a "labourer" living in Cowley near Uxbridge where he had been born in 1818l.     In the same census his maternal grandfather was listed as a shepherd in Docking in Norfolk, where he had been born in 1816.

I suppose lockdown makes you think of family and roots and the past and future.  Certainly mine is not an entirely predictable one for someone who is a Member of the Scottish Parliament, a long term SNP member and a  Cabinet Secretary in a Scottish Government, writing this from beside a loch in Argyll. 

But I have still more work to do on the whole story , perhaps when I retire.