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FERGUSON/HAMILTON/WILKIE: Auchterderran church.

Plaque at Auchterderran Church, Kinglassie, Fife. Many Wilkies were baptised here, including Andrew Wilkie's father David, on 6.8.1796. LIFE IN 19TH CENTURY FIFESHIRE: The marriage of David Wilkie and Mary Fernie was proclaimed at Abbotshall, Fifeshire, November 10, 1815. Abbotshall is on the Firth of Forth in the district of Kirkcaldy, Fife. It contained the village of Chapel and Abbotshall itself, which comprised of Linktown and Newtown. Abbotshall is now known as Linktown. Lewis’s Directory of Scotland (1846) names the main crops as wheat, barley, oats, potatoes and turnips, with peas, beans and other greens. Sheep were mostly Cheviots with a few black cattle and a mixture of Fife, Angus and other breeds. Limestone was quarried in Chapel for farming and other uses. Coal had been mined there but by 1846 the mines had not worked for some years. The chief manufacture was the weaving of ticking with some 5000 looms in the district. A steam-powered factory made linen sheeting, another made sail canvas and there was a bleachfield. The parish contained several water-driven mills for barley-meal and flour, and one for flint grinding. There was a pottery for brown earthenware and local clay was used in the brick and tile kilns. In 1846 coal-gas works were set up to light the towns of Linktown and Newtown. David Wilkie was a Ploughman/ Agricultural labourer working on local farms and Mary Fernie’s father was a labourer in linen production. He worked at Prinlaw’s Bleachfield in Leslie in the 1790’s and in the same industry in Abbotshall when David’s youngest child David was born in 1804. David Snr contracted jaundice while he was working as a farm labourer at Skeddoway and died on July 18, 1848 at the age of 52. His widow Mary was living at Little Skeddoway, Thornton, Dysart for the 1851 Census - she had taken in 2 boarders. Mary died there aged 76 in January, 1871. NOTES BY BETTY JAMIESON.

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