>Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 07:44:30 -0700 I'm not sure to whom this message was directed: >From: "Robert Blake Allan" <rballan@home.com> >To: ORKNEY-L@rootsweb.com >Message-ID: <001d01befebf$a7c58160$6b404218@CS910969-A.gvmt1.bc.wave.home.com> >Subject: Re: [ORKNEY] Braehead?? >Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="iso-8859-1" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > >What was your great gf's name? B Allan If the question was directed to me (Blake and I discovered a year or two ago that we are distant cousins), my great-grandfather was James BANKS(2), 2nd of 8 children of James BANKS(1) and Eliza Gray ALLAN. He was born at "Smiddybanks", St Margarets Hope (the farmhouse on the western shore of the bay of St Margarets Hope, adjoining and below "The Braehead")in 1837. The BANKS family still lives there. James(2) went to sea as an apprentice midshipman when he was 14 and progressed to became senior captain and commodore of the AUSN Company based in Sydney, Australia. He died in Sydney in 1905 aged 67. From the various family history notes I have seen, it seems that James(2)'s youngest sister, Ann Carmichael (Annie) BANKS b.1849, inherited "The Braehead" from her maternal grandmother, Mary ALLAN nee KENNEDY - "The Braehead" had originally been a KENNEDY property, it became associated with the ALLAN family when Mary KENNEDY, the eldest child of James KENNEDY and Isabella GRAY, married James ALLAN in 1805, it passed to the BANKS family through Ann Carmichael BANKS, and then to the SINCLAIR family by her marriage to W A SINCLAIR in 1890. From surviving letters of the 1930s, it is clear there was an affectionate link between "The Braehead" residents and their cousins in Australia. __________________________ Keith Dash Sydney, Australia