Julie, Thank you SO much for the Greenock Newspaper BMD Index url. It's a delight. Just as you say, a few little gems from it have helped me on my way and it's marvellous delving through all the McVEANs and SINCLAIRs on it. There were a couple of marriages I already knew about, but still fun to see these announced, but my main find up to now was a hitherto unknown son, daughter in law and grandsons to my McVEAN great great great grandfather's half brother. Big deal, you might think, but the half brother has always been an elusive character, so I'm always glad to thrilled to confirmation he really existed and Had A Life. His name was the same as his nephew, my great great grandfather, Peter/Patrick McVean, b 1796 & ca 1816 respectively, and both married in Strathlachlan in Argyll. Someone else researching this line had both marriages down to my fisherman great great grandfather Peter/Patrick McVean, making my great great grandmother the second wife. Interesting, I thought, and quite within the realms of possibility - until I found Wife Number 1 alive and kicking on Bute, long after 2ggranddad had married my 2 gt granny! A girl in every port? Now, I can deal with bigamy - and there are skeletons in all our family history closets - but I found it hard to believe that the Minister and the Kirk Sessions could. Was it likely Peter McVean could marry Kate Sinclair in his own village while everyone knew that Kate McQuilkan was raising a bunch of his kids only a few (sea)miles down the Kyles of Bute? And everyone must have known; OK, so they didn't have email, but news travels fast over water. There had to be another answer but where: not too much trouble finding the wife and children and following them around Rothesay down the years - but where was the man himself? Peter McVean was hardly ever home on census night and it took me years to find his death record. But I eventually did, despite the idiosyncratic spelling of their name in the Bute records. Although some Bute records seem hard to find on Scotland's People, I did find records for the wife, 5 children and a few grandchildren but Great Great Great Grand Uncle Paddy/Peter McVean himself held out for a long time. I thought I now finally had them all in the picture, until I saw the Greenock Newspaper index and found mentions for another son altogether, Hugh, leading to a family of his own. Thank you, Julie! Of course, in genealogy, one answered question merely leads to another, and I'm still puzzled as to where this Hugh character was hiding all the census nights as a child before he migrated to Renfrewshire. Maybe at sea with his dad, though surely not as a 3-year old? Not to mention whether or where he was ever born or baptised. Oh well, keeps us off the streets, I suppose. Thank you Julie Katie de Haan The Netherlands ----- Original Message ----- From: "Julie Dufault" <inverkip@comcast.net> To: <sct-renfrew@rootsweb.com> Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 11:51 PM Subject: Re: [SCT-RENFREW] Greenock Resources > While the Greenock Newspaper BMD Index is completely dependent on family > having had the announcements put into the newspaper, like anything, you > never know what little gem might help you along. Thanks to my Beith > family putting in the death of Hamilton Beith, we were finally able to > figure out what happened to him. He disappeared from Scotland after the > 1851 census. He had emigrated to Valparaiso, Chile and died there, the > rest of his siblings had stayed in Scotland or gone to the USA, some of > his cousins ended up in England. Of course, I'm looking forward to the > index being added to, so I check my other family surnames. > > Julie > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > SCT-RENFREW-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message