Margaret’s last brother was born in Burghead in
1833, at least the last one for whom we have birth records, and our search of
the Ardclach and Burghead 1841 census does not yield any record of her family.
We have zeroed in on the
Barque Clio, arriving in New York City on June 11, 1836, with James, carpenter
age 40, Margaret his wife, Margaret spinster age 18 and David and James ages 7
and 5.
The mother of James’
children was Elizabeth Mitchell, and we have concluded she must have died
between 1833 and 1836. Then I found a marriage of James McQueen shipwright of
Burghead to Margaret Baxter, of Roseisle, which is a nearby village, on 12
April 1836. I began a search to find out the following: could
the James and Margaret we see landing in New York on the Clio on 11 June have
been married on 12 April and still have been in time to board the Clio?
From the Edinburgh
Scotsman, 19 Mar 1836:
Well, that won't help us,
certainly 4 April would be too early, but that is Leith, not Cromarty where they
would have boarded.
From the Scotsman, 9 April
1836:
Well, that’s not good! To
Newcastle! What about New York? And heading south, away from Cromarty!
Then I was lucky enough to
obtain a clipping from the Aberdeen Journal, 16 Mar 1836:
This is promising. It
looks to me as if Newcastle was a clerical mistake – New York, Newcastle,
whatever... And here we learn that it was expected that there be a 10-15 day
duration between the date of leaving Leith to the date of leaving Cromarty.
Since we know the Clio cleared out of Leith on 6 April, running late, we would
expect it to leave Cromarty between the 16th and the 21st.
But since they were running
late they must have tried to make up for lost time because, from the Inverness
Courier, emailed to me by the reference librarian at the Inverness
Library, dated 22 April 1836, which was a Friday:
Of course, this does not
prove that the James and Margaret aboard the Clio were the couple married in
Burghead on 12 April, nor does it link them to our Margaret with any certainty,
but it proves that the puzzle solution we are proposing COULD have happened. So
far it is not contradicted by any inconvenient realities that would make it
impossible.
I also know of another
clipping which I don’t have yet, from the Leith Commercial Lists, summarized as
“from Leith, with 41 passengers to New York 6 Apr 1836." Interesting that there
were 41 boarding at Leith, and 74 altogether, meaning 33 boarded at Cromarty.
We will search for more information about the James and
Margaret McQueen we see in the 1850 Brooklyn census, although this James is
listed as a cartman, not a carpenter, and for a Presbyterian church in Brooklyn
where they might have been members.