May 18th

William Fisken 1837 - 1917

On this day your great great grandfather, William Fisken, died.

This is not the William Fisken of steam-plough fame but of course they are related.  Plough William is GGgrandfather William's uncle.

The other interesting relationship is that GGgrandfather William is the brother of Flora Fisken who happens to be your great great grandmother.  His daughter married her son.  This means you are short a couple of great great grandparents!

Anyway, to William Fisken of the day.

All our Fiskens started off in Perthshire, Scotland and then some ended up some 50 odd miles east of there in Dunbartonshire and then some, like William, ended up in Newcastle upon Tyne in England.

I don't have an exact birth date for William so I'll write about his beginnings here.  He was born in Muthill, Perthshire in about 1837.  He was the fourth child of the five born to Peter Fisken, a sawyer and Elizabeth Crerar.  His sister Flora of above, was a year younger than him.  

William became a sawyer.  I'm not sure how long he remained in Perthshire but presumably until he was old enough to be off on his own.  We find him on the 1861 census already in Dunbartonshire - in Tarbet on Loch Lomond - lodging with his future parents-in-law, the Campbells.  He married one of their daughters, Lily Campbell in 1868.  I will already have written about the marriage last month as the date was April 30th.  But I will re-iterate here:  William and Lily were married in Dumbarton in the church which I visited last year.  What a treat that was!  William was 30 years old and Lily was 29.  She was a dressmaker.  Lily already had a child - Neil - who was 10 years old at time of the marriage.  Neil had his biological father's surname (MacDonald) but went by his mother's name Campbell.  William and Lily had six children between 1869 and 1882.  The fifth child was Catherine Fisken - our direct line - she is your great grandmother.

After Catherine - your great grandmother - married her first cousin William Fisken Glover of Northumberland/Newcastle in 1904, she moved to Newcastle.  This occured just shortly after her mother Lily died.  A few years later, William (the William Fisken of today's post) moved to Newcastle too.  And interestingly three of his adult children moved too.  So this was the migration of the Fisken name into the Newcastle area.  At one point he was the head of the household at 92 Georges Road in Newcastle and four of his adult chldren as well as his son-in-law William Glover and his and Catherine's three children (my dad's siblings) were living with him.  This is according to the census taken in 1911.  Sometime after that the Glover/Fisken couple (your great grandparents) moved to 88 Ethel Street (an address which remained "in the family" (though never owned) until 1960).  And it was at 88 Ethel Street that William Fisken died on May 18th in 1917.  He was 79 years old, a retired wood sawyer.  He died from bronchitis.

I've never been able to figure out where he is buried. I would like to do so.  It's one of my ongoing challenges!

I will just finish up with a brief update on those other children (other than great great grandmother Catherine) of William and Lily.  In birth order:

• Mary McFarlane Fisken married a seaman of Bristol and she lived down there (and hence set off the chain of events which caused me to have an aunt and uncle in Bristol)
• Elizabeth Lilly Allan Fisken went to Newcastle.  Never married.  She was the "Aunt Lil" my dad would speak of (I actually believed she raised my dad - but maybe not exactly).  Aunt Lil was still living when I was born but I have no personal memory of her.  Alison does of course.  She remembers her as very formidable lady who scared her half to death!
• William Fisken moved to Newcastle and worked in the shipyards.  He doesn't seem to have married - he certainly was still single at age 40.  I lose him after that.  
• Alan Campbell Fisken went to Australia!  It is two of his grandchildren in Adelaide with whom I'm in contact.
• And finally, Duncan Campbell Fisken went to Newcastle as part of the Fisken Wave.  He was a ship's carpenter.  He married Eva Ferguson in Newcastle when he was 29.  They moved south - first to Cheshire and then to the greater London area.  He died in 1953 at age 70.  He and Eva had one child - a son Alan who was killed in 1945.  He was a flying officer in the RAF.  He left a widow and a young son.