Introduction

With some variations, the chronological order is expected to follow my research process and not my tree. When certain family "stories" seem to want to be told, they will have their own post. To be truthful, even the research process will not be terribly rigourous and scientific, but flippant and chatty.

My father, the Logan, in the middle, about a century after 1850.

For example, being a bit of a Celtic snob (WCPWCP= White Celtic Protestant Working Class Princess) I was quite confident that I would NOT find English ancestors, so imagine my shock of discovering that my Great-Grandfather Logan was in fact born in Birkenhead. Birkenhead is the south side of the Mersey across from Liverpool. This area is known as the Wirral and is ( or was) in Cheshire.  In the 1840s and 1850s it was one of the cities that was in a radically growth phase. My Dumfries G-G-Grandparents moved their family to Birkenhead around 1855 (the story of why and how that went will come later) but the point is their youngest son Robert was born there in 1857. He went to Glasgow to start work in the printing industry later, but technically, he was English. Shocking!

This is important methodologically speaking because until I started to widen my search for Robert's birth to include, like, Cheshire, I couldn't confirm the link to Dumfries.  He was missing from Scotland. Once I found him, and also in the 1861 census for Cheshire, I was able to track his parents back to Dumfries. So, backwards to Dumfries:


John Logan, Tallow Chandler, single, 25, is a boarder at Agnes McGuffog's boarding house on Irish Street in Dumfries, June 1841.  He's my G-G-Grandfather (but probably doesn't know it).  So: "what's a tallow chandler?" -  "It's a candlemaker."  That's (sort of) how it starts...

"The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker..."(2)   I started with the rarest (in today's market).