Among the prisoners held at "Wiggin" (Wigan) at an unspecified date after the failure of the 1715 rebellion I have found the following:- No. Chr. N. Sirname Parish County Company Regiment 95 Geo. Margerybanks Sineland Tividall Archibald McDonnell, Dunslapeness(?) Argileshire. He is given no military rank but is listed among a group of "Scotch servants." This doesn't appear to get us much further but it does represent progress, even if most of it is negative. I've been unable as yet to find Sineland (it is possible, though I don't think so, that my transliteration is wrong, much more possible that the clerk has it slightly wrong) but fortunately there was a clue to Tividall in that another prisoner was listed as from Roxborough, Tividalls - and I do know where Roxburgh is! Tividall is certainly Teviotdale & is so named in c. 1300; It runs SW - NE through the old county of Roxburghshire for about 30 miles to join the Tweed at Kelso (incidentally, it is a really lovely drive from Teviothead to Kelso). All this virtually proves that my theory that George was a scion of the Balbardie branch must be wrong; if he belonged to any already known branch it must have been the Eccles lot, I imagine (Journal 2) - Kelso is only 5 miles or so SW of Eccles. He would be the right age to be a grandson - presumably youngest & thus landless - of William, the first known to have settled in the area, except for Adam M., the miller at Gordon, a year or two earlier. He seems to have been of fairly low social status, since he is named as a servant (or perhaps just very young) . There is plenty of evidence that the Scottish prisoners were treated pretty brutally - some 70 are said to have been tortured to death. George seems in the end to have come off extremely well, having escaped from poverty at home, escaped death in battle, survived harsh imprisonment and a long voyage, been indentured to a sympathetic master, married his daughter and died a rich man. Not bad going! I have no trace of a George in or around Eccles, but that is hardly surprising. There are no registers from before 1700 and the only people of whom one hears are those who held property and so appear in the Sasines Register. I'm a little worried that George is not a name that occurs at all among the Eccles lot (the counterpart of the helpfulness when researching the Sams of knowing that Samuel, while rare generally, was common among one set of Marjoribankses), and wonder if he is an "oddball" - perhaps his father or grandfather wandered down to Teviotdale from, say, Edinburgh (where George M. is a name that is known, albeit not quite at a fitting date). Any way, that's where I've got to - thanks to Leigh for pointing me in the right direction. On a completely different note, I've found that Balbardie (first recorded as Balbardi in 1325) means "Farm of the bards" - either Baile a bhaird or Baile nam bard in Gaelic. Worth putting into the "Houses" article, Bob? Roger