Hi Cheryl, I can offer you a partial answer to your questions. Firstly, about the Hay family. If you go to the Wigtownshire Pages again and click on M'Kerlie on the left-hand side of th home page, that will take you to an index of the estates described by Peter Handyside M'Kerlie in his 1870/77 book "Lands and their Owners in Galloway' If you know or can make a good guess at the estate from in the long list, you will know the page number and the volume. But, and it's a big but, to get any further down that particular road you need to find someone who has access to a copy, or a library that has it or can borrow it. One possibility is to go to Lookups / Other, also on the Home Page and I see two names there that have been able to help. However, I'll also guess that there are listers with a pretty good knowledge of the family. If you go to the the M'Kerlie initial page and run on down to the bottom there's a link that will take you to the Names index. It does include Hay, which was certainly a very well known old name, but I'm afraid it does no more. When I compiled the list a few years ago now, I realized that there were just too many index references to the names, so that once again the only sane move from there would be to read the book! But you should also know that M'Kerlie only discussed land owners & almost never the tenants. As for the move from ploughman to coachman, ploughman was certainly a job at the top of any "esteem" table that one could have produced for farm workers in 1851. But I think that going to coachman was probably a move up, even though off the farm. Both were considered as horsemen, and as such, quite sought after, if they were good. That year was also a hard one for farm workers in Wigtownshire. My gg grandfather was in his 50s & fairly well established as a ploughman and later farm bailiff, but his son, my g grandfather, had to migrate to Ayrshire and become a mine worker. The Irish famine of the late 1840s had brought a very considerable influx of farm labor from Ireland into Wigtownshire, and farm wages fell, and farm job opportunities all but disappeared for some years. It was a long walk up into Ayrshire for John & his new bride. Crawford.