The Lamb Section

It's worth noting at the outset that the name should in fact be 'Spence' not 'Lamb'. My great-grandfather was in fact registered as James Lamb Spence, but later changed the order to James Spence Lamb. He was born in 1864 in Peterhead, the illegitimate son of Eliza Spence, (with no father's name give), but later changed the order of his name and gave his father as James Lamb. That makes it difficult to go further back so the trail goes cold for the time being. There are plenty of names from that date on however, because after he married Catherine Christie Watson (Grant) in 1882 they went on to have 17 children and at least 43 grandchildren. Ten of the children were sons, so the name Lamb must now be very common in the Peterhead/Aberdeen area, meaning that we must have lots of cousins that we haven't yet traced.

James was a stone mason who worked on several important buildings in Peterhead, including the Drill Hall, and even engraved a beautiful granite family gravestone. In later life he went blind, and he died in 1947, aged 83.

His son, Alfred, (who also used the name Frederick) was my grandfather and he was the 10th of the 17 children. During WW1 Fred served with the Gordon Highlanders but was discharged in February 1918. He was then a steward on HMS Akbar until he moved to Perth and married Barbara Garland Gold. In the late 1920s they moved from Perth where he had been a journeyman grocer staying with his widowed mother-in-law in Burghmuir Road to Cairnie Brae, Findo Gask to work for Lord Forteviot on his Dupplin estate. This job did not last long however and in 1929 he, along with many others, was laid off. An insurance man came to the house and suggested that Fred should also try his hand at insurance. He took up this idea and joined the Co-operative Society and moved the family back to Perth. During WW2 he joined the LDV, later the Home Guard.

Inexplicably, in 1944 he deserted his family and (apart from a painful visit to him in Greenock) they never heard from him again. As well as leaving behind his wife and family, including a son of 14 or 15, he lost touch with his father, who never forgave him for this desertion. The family in Perth did keep in touch with Peterhead and made the trip north a few times. We now know that he subsequently had a happy second marriage to Sheila Mackinnon after Garland died in 1947. They had two daughters, but sadly he died when the younger girl was only six in 1961.

It's sad that Fred wasn't able to say in touch because he would have known that he had nine grandchildren in Perth, two boys and seven girls. He also missed the weddings of three of his children and, more tragically, the death of one of his daughters. However, the happy ending is that after another 50 years passed the two families heard about each other, met up, and felt to some extent they had 'put things right'.