In the previous two posts I explored the life of Alice Martha Stormont Timpson née Robb (1857 – 1895), the wife of Alfred Newton Timpson (1846 – 1921) and the daughter of my great great grandfather William Robb (1813 – 1888) by his second wife Marianne Mansfield Palmer (1830 – 1883).
I was interested in the way that Alice and her descendants perpetuated the memory of their Scottish ancestors, in the names that they gave their children. One of Alice’s own names, Stormont, commemorated the tradition that her grandmother (her father William Robb’s mother) Margaret Ricketts Monteith was the daughter of John Monteith and his wife Matilda, who was in turn said to be the daughter of Viscount Stormont. Alice would name one of her sons Sidney Stormont Timpson and another Howard Monteith Timpson. Another son, Spencer Cuthbert Timpson, named his daughter Margery Stormont Timpson.
As I’ve mentioned a number of times before, I’ve been frustrated by my failure to find any evidence that would either confirm or disprove the story of my Robb ancestors’ connection with Scottish nobility. The only source for the story is the extract from the family Bible that first set me off on my genealogical quest many years ago. In the early 1970s, when I was a teenager, Edna Robb (1915 – 1955), the unmarried daughter of my grandfather’s brother Thomas Bowman Robb (1887 – 1963), who had emigrated to New Zealand as a young man, visited Britain to meet her relatives and to explore her English and Scottish roots. We met Edna at a family party in East Ham, at which I remember her telling us that she had visited Scotland and brought back evidence of the Robb family’s Scottish ancestry. Edna left behind a few typewritten sheets, of which I was given a copy, and which formed the basis of the first ever Robb family tree that I drew up – at the age of sixteen.
Edna Robb is fourth from the left (next to my grandfather Arthur Ernest Robb) in the back row of this photograph, taken at the family gathering in East Ham in 1972 (I’m on the extreme left of the same row).
I reproduced the content of the document in a post a few years ago. It consists of memoranda written by both my great grandfather Charles Edward Robb (1851 – 1934) and his father William Robb, and it includes this statement, apparently written by William in 1880:
My mother Margaret Ricketts Monteith was the only daughter of John Monteith and Matilda his wife who was the daughter of Viscount Stormont who was engaged as well as my Father’s father in the affair of Prince Charles attempt to gain the crown 1745/6.
Despite extensive enquiries, I’ve never been able to discover where Edna obtained the document, or who transcribed them, or who was (or is) in possession of the original. Together with other Robb family researchers, I’ve been able to confirm the truth of most of the claims made in the document, particularly about William’s generation and those that followed. It has also been possible to substantiate some of the statements made about earlier generations: for example, that my 3rd great grandfather Charles Edward Stuart Robb’s older brother William was a minister in the Scottish Episcopal Church.
However, finding evidence to support some of the other claims about the Robb family’s Scottish history has proven more difficult. For example, the document states that my 3rd great grandparents Charles and Margaret Robb were married at St Mungo’s, Glasgow, on 15th October 1802. I believe this is a reference to Glasgow Cathedral, also known as the High Kirk. However, neither I nor any other researcher has been able to find any trace of the marriage in the extant church records.
Engraving of Glasgow cathedral
Nor have I been able to find any reference in the public records to a John Monteith who married a woman named Matilda, not to mention any evidence to support the claim that she was the daughter of a viscount. I assume that the Monteiths were from Glasgow, since that was where their daughter was married. There were a number of prominent men named John Monteith living in the city in the second half of the eighteenth century, but I haven’t been able to discover a definite link between any of them and my Robb ancestors.
I believe that another of my 3rd great grandfather Charles Robb’s brothers was the Glasgow merchant George Robb (1769 – 1811), and some time ago I suggested that there was an indirect connection between George and a John Monteith who was involved in the wine trade. George Robb was married to Penelope Thomson and I believe they are the uncle and aunt referred to by William Robb in his memorandum:
I had also an Uncle George who died many years ago leaving children but I don’t know how many. I had also an Aunt called Penelope…
Penelope Thomson had a half-brother named Henry, a Glasgow law writer, whose son John worked as a wine merchant in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Apparently John Thomson’s business partner was a certain John Monteith. It’s likely that this John Monteith would have been too young to be the father of my 3rd great grandmother Margaret, but perhaps there is a family connection of some kind?
Then there is the more famous John Monteith of Anderston who established the first Scottish power loom company at Pollokshaws, Glasgow in 1801. He was the son of cotton manufacturer James Monteith and the brother of James Monteith junior, also a cotton dealer, and of Henry Monteith, who eventually took over the family business and was elected to Parliament in 1820. However, I’ve yet to find any evidence that this John Monteith was married to a woman named Matilda or had a daughter named Margaret; and once again, the dates may be too late for our purposes.
There is, of course, the possibility that my great great grandfather got his facts wrong, or that he misremembered what his mother told him about her family background. After all, he seems to have been mistaken in his claim that his uncle, Rev William Robb, was a professor of Greek at St Andrews. I can find no evidence of this, though we know that the Rev William was a minister in the town. Just recently, I came across a record at Ancestry that intrigued me. On 12th July 1776, a man named John Monteith married a woman named Martha Stormont in Glasgow. Might this be ‘our’ John Monteith, and could William Robb have got the name of his grandmother wrong, and could the connection between Martha Stormont and Viscount Stormont be fanciful? The marriage took place in the ‘Associate Session’ in Glasgow: the ‘Associate Synods’ broke away from the main Church of Scotland in the 18th century. I believe that John Monteith of Pollokshaws was a member, so this marriage record may refer to him.
On the other hand, how likely is it that my great great grandfather William Robb would get the name of his grandmother wrong? He may never have met her, but his own mother Margaret did not die until William was thirty years old, so surely the information she passed on to him would have been reliable? Not only that, but Charles and Margaret named their eldest daughter Matilda, a name that William also gave to one of his daughters – presumably in honour of Margaret’s mother.
I’m planning to revisit my research into the Robb family’s Glasgow connections in forthcoming posts.
