Beginnings - June 2008

This web log was set up in order to share family tree research with family members, and for family members to post comments, photos, and share their own stories about our antecedents.

It has been prompted by a very pleasant trip to Comrie, Perthshire, in June 2008 when many members of the Hutton and Keay families gathered to say farewell to Uncle Davey.


(Hello to all who find this blog, please bear with me while I make some inevitable mistakes!
Please note that for security on the web, posts on this blog should not contain email addresses or personal details about anyone (still alive) other than the very general.)

That trip to Comrie was the first time in many decades that all of David Keay's surviving nephews & nieces were together, and it was an occasion for many memories! It should be said by way of introductions that I am Lisa, daughter of Charles Keay - one of David's nephews. Charles died in 2005.

Uncle David is the cute little boy in the middle of this picture (21/8/1921 is scribbled on the back). Uncle David sadly died last year and he wished for his ashes to be returned to the cemetery grounds at Comrie, in common with his brothers. The brothers seen in this image are John (Jock, on the left) and William (Bill, on the right) Keay, and we can also see their Mother Jane Hutton.
We can see at the rear of this group their new family home, a top tenement flat on the Main Street of Comrie. The ground floor was taken up by Stephens' sweet shop and Blaikie's bike shop either side of the close (common passage). It sounds like an idyllic place to be brought up, eh?

Here, Alastair remembers visiting his Gran "I never saw Alastair Blaikie register a single sale in his {bike} shop on all the occasions we visited Comrie! Our favourite shop was, of course, Charlie Stephens sweet shop on the other side of The Close. He sold various fierce chews like sherbet and liquorice, tattie scones (with a tiny plastic toy eg car embedded in it) and some real enamel busters including gobstoppers and aniseed balls."

"When we stayed at Drummond Street during holidays, we slept at the front of the building. The room was dark enough at night because Grandpa used to draw over heavy curtains he'd had since the black-out in WW2. However, it was difficult to get to sleep because we could smell the chips from the Fish 'n' Chip shop across the street and hear the punters clinking glasses in The Ancaster Arms. I think Dad was probably in there with the locals. Names I remember are Willie Gray, Norman Fyffie and Campbell McIntyre." Thanks, Alastair!

The Huttons had a tiny kitchen and a communal bathroom which was halfway down the central stairs. The old picture above is taken in the lovely shared garden, which is a place we visited on our trip. Folks remembered going through a gate at the bottom of the garden to get to school.


Our visit prompted many memories as it hasn't changed a lot, as can be seen from the modern-day picture here.
Elaine remembered Grannie Hutton (Jane nee Clark, Keay, Hutton) as a very elderly lady having to walk backwards to comfortably get down the central stairwell in the block.















The cousins revisiting Comrie all remembered visiting their Grandparents here, and remembered the communal wash-house, shed & bicycle - all still there!

There is a tragic story behind that 1921 snapshot. The father of these three boys was a baker, David Keay, who served at his trade during The Great War. He transferred to become a Private in the 1st Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers but was killed shortly after that, just months before the war ended (1/9/1918 aged 32). David & Jane had 3 sons John, William and David Keay, but sadly only John was old enough to have many memories of his father. There is a moving tribute paid to him and all the men of Comrie who fell in the Great War, and it is from this that we have our only photograph of him, as well as a description which also seems to us now to fit his sons very well. See the next posting for this.

David Keay (father of our recently deceased Uncle) was born Nov 8th, 1886, in Perth. He is entered in the National Census of 1901 as a Message boy, aged 14 (more on the rest of his family in another posting). He moved to 9, Burrell Square Crieff and met & married the girl next-door, Jane Clark. They married at Crieff Manse, Aug 12th, 1910 (ages 24 & 18 given on the birth certificate). David was a baker, working for his wife/fiancee's family company. In 1911, he was living in Crieff, at 65 High St. The family (at the time of the 1911 census) consisted David (24, a Baker), Jane (21), and son John (5 months old). He came to Comrie to live & work sometime between 1911 & 1914, working for the bakery of Mr John Turnbull (we know he worked for him for 5 years). He then enlisted in Perth to serve in the Army Service Corps at his trade.

Jane Clark (b. 1890, she seems to appear in the Crieff census of 1901, aged 11, with a mother called Jane, aged 42 - more on that later). She worked as a Clerkess and was married 1910 in Crieff. From their marriage certificate, the Bride's parents are William Clark (baker, deceased) and Jane Clark (looks like nee McKeith), and the witnesses were William Keay (brother of the groom) & Ellison Clark (a younger sister of the bride).

After the war, the widowed Jane Keay remarried to Charlie Hutton and became Jane Hutton, while her sons retained their father's name.
Read more about Charlie's family: here.

I recently got hold of their marriage certificate (ask me if you'd like a copy) and it shows us they married in November 1922, in central Perth.  Charlie was a stone quarryman, aged 24 (perhaps of this quarry which is still active).
Jane was aged 32, living at Drummond St, Comrie as we knew. They married by Warrant of the Perthshire Sheriff, so it was an irregular marriage*.  They made their declaration at 4, King Edward St., Perth in front of Alexander Edward Douglas (of Crieff) and Ann Clark Hutton (Charlie's sister, of Newburgh - the Aunt Ann who married Archie Bett).  Any idea who Alex Douglas was? Perhaps he was a brother-in-law of Jane's Clark family who were from Crieff?

{* This Glasgow University site explained irregular marriages to me - it appears in the Victorian era they were very much frowned upon but less so after WW I. They were fairly frequent (12% of marriages at the time) and much cheaper than a regular marriage by Banns. They ceased around 1940.}

They lived in the top flat as in the images here, and in the year 1921 Jane would have been approximately 31. Jane & Charlie went on to have 2 girls, (Margaret born in 1923 & Evelyn born in 1926) and a boy (Charles) who died as an infant in 1934. {We have a copy of a birth certificate and know he was baptised. Jane would have been around 47 years old then.}

Jane and Charles Hutton died around 1954 and 1969 respectively (open to corrections on that).

A useful link here to a website with old maps - here's a page with an 1866 map showing Crieff, here's a page with an 1866 map of Comrie.
Perth & Kinross Archives have a page of treasures on a Flickr page: here.

Read more about Comrie here (about the library, est. 1901)...
Also the Papers in a Trunk pages of Highland Strathearn have many interesting tidbits about the Comrie area - e.g. this one shows the Ross bridge (Thanks to Peter for the tip there!).

Do send in your comments, or corrections. Thankyou!
Much love to all

Lisa