Maternal Great Grandmother
5th Generation
Born - 15th January 1913 - Bo'ness Linlithgow Scotland
Died - 29th December 2003 - Fife, ScotlandJanet was born in Bo’ness in 1913, however her brother John was born 14 months later in Buckhaven, Methil – she will have no recollection of living anywhere other than Buckhaven as a child.
In the 1921 Census she was living at 84 East High Street, Buckhaven with her Father William Rae and mother Jeannie McNeill. She was the eldest at 9 years old. Her brother John was 7 and her sister’s Elizabeth and Helen were only 18 months and 5 months old. Janet and John were both Scholars at the local school,
At the time she was growing up Buckhaven was a mining village. One of her jobs as a child would be to go down the beach and collect coal. At the turn of the century Buckhaven had the second largest fishing fleet in Scotland, but due to the recent rise in coal, families were coming all over for work in the mines.
Janet married my Great Grandfather, Peter McKinlay Leitch in April 1931 (He was a coalminer just like her father was) and had my Di, Thomas Rattray Leitch in the August of the same year. She was 18 years old. They moved into their first home in Tweed Street, Denbeath where he was born (This was only a room rented from her Aunt). Tweed Street was owned by Wemyss Coal Company. The houses were built in 1905. Little did she know that her son who was born in a house built by the Wemyss estate would die, 82 years later in the hospital also built buy the Wemyss estate.
They shortly moved to St Andrews Square in Lower Methil. This was the house she brought her children up in, the house her grandchildren came to stay in. This was her home. She spent most of her life living here.
My great gran was a family lady, she didn’t want to go anywhere, she was happy being at home and surrounded by her family. I have listed below her siblings to show the closeness of them all
John Rae was her oldest brother. Being of the right age he joined the Black Watch to fight for his country in WW2. He was captured (I believe in France but he never spoke of it so don’t know for sure) and became a Prisoner of War in camp BAB 20, Kedzierzyn-Kozle in what is now Poland, He was never the same again. He never married. Her younger sister Helen (Ellen) married Robert Duff in 1939, just at the start of the war. He was a Sgt in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and died in the air whilst flying over Cologne in WWII 1944.
Above Helen and Robert’s wedding photo and John’s name listed as a POW
When the war was over her sister Elizabeth (Betty) married Sandy Ferguson. Annie then married Robert Carr in 1946 and Wilhelmina (Ina) married John Shaw in 1949. Ina and Jock Shaw actually lived next door to me for a time in the 1980s! Next to get married was her brother Archibald (Archie) who married Janet Beveridge (Nettie) in 1951. Her brother Will never married.
Betty, Ina and Will all outlived my great gran and all died in 2007. It is a sad year when a whole generation is lost. These are all names and dates to us but what it shows was the family and love that surrounded my great gran. Her own family, her siblings (other than Andrew & Bertie) who moved to Glasgow and her parents all lived nearby. It’s a way of live that will never be like that again.
Marie's Genealogy 