Thomas Ogilvie, a ploughman, lived in the Angus parish of Kettins in the late 18th Century. His second child, Betty, met a Shoemaker called John Inches, probably in Dundee, in the early 1840s. They got married in 1843 and lived in a 3-room shop on the corner of Camperdown Court and Barrack Street in central Dundee until John’s death in 1878. He had a prosperous business that employed 6 men in its heyday. His second daughter Betsy, born in 1856, was one of his machinists. She married Perth man John Stewart in 1876, and went to live in Glasgow, where he worked for the Scottish Cooperative Society. Their daughter Jane married into the Hamilton family from Dumfriesshire and became mother-in-law to one of the Glasgow Batesons, who eventually returned to the ancestral home in Windhill, Yorkshire.
Betsy Inches was a short, good-looking woman, quiet and not given to making fanciful statements. She, or her mother, was reputed to have witnessed the Tay Bridge disaster on the night of Sunday December 28 1879, when a train from the south fell into the river. How she managed to see the bridge on a stormy winter’s night, when the flat she lived in did not have a view of the river, is not clear.
Betsy was also said to have claimed that JM Barrie, the playwright, was her cousin, or second cousin.
They were not first cousins because there was no common grandparent:
James Matthew Barrie was the son of Margaret Ogilvy and David Barrie. His maternal grandparents were Alexander Ogilvy and
Mary Edward.
Betsy Inches’s maternal grandparents were Thomas Ogilvie and Janet Millar.
But they could have been cousins by marriage:
Betsy Inches’s uncle, John Ogilvy, was the husband of Innes Edward, whom he married on 5 June 1843.
Innes (or Innis, from the Gaelic for island) or Eunice (on her gravestone), was born in Kingoldrum parish,
possibly at Over Ascreavie, where her father Peter was a tenant farmer.
Ascreavie
was an estate about 5 miles NW of Kirriemuir.
JM Barrie’s grandmother Mary (or May) Edward probably also came from Ascreavie. Her husband, and JM Barrie’s grandfather, Alexander Ogilvy, a stone mason, was born at Over (or Upper) Ascreavie farm on 5 February 1788.
The small farm communities in this area contained few families - Ogilvy, Edward and Stormonth were the principal names and
intermarriage must have been common.
It would be surprising if Innes Edward was not related in some way to JM Barrie’s Mary Edward. Unfortunately, the piece of the
genealogical jigsaw that would confirm such a connection is missing.
In particular, nothing is known about Mary Edward other than the fact that she married Alexander Ogilvy around 1815,
gave birth to JM Barrie’s mother Margaret Ogilvy in 1818 and died about 1827. This puts her likely year of birth between 1785 and 1795,
perhaps too late for her to belong to the Edward family below.
Innes Edward’s father, Peter, was the second child of Robert Edward and Janet Fenton, who married on 7 September 1769.
Janet, their firstborn, was baptised at Newbigging (labelled Aucharroch on the OS map) on 25 December 1770. She died on 11 January 1771.
Peter was probably baptised as Patrick (Peter and Patrick were often used interchangeably) on 10 September 1772 at “New Begg”.
He and his wife Janet Ramsay married around 1805 and had 4 sons and 3 daughters, including Innes.
Jean, Robert and Janet’s last recorded child, was born at Newbigging on 7 December 1774. There is no other information about her.
Robert Edward died of fever, almost 2 years later, on 22 September 1776.
Innes Edward is on the Ogilvy family tombstone in Newtyle Parish Churchyard.
Her four brothers and two sisters are all mentioned on a monument erected by her niece Jean Young Adam at Kingoldrum Parish Church:
Thomas Edward, born around 1808, was a general labourer in Kirriemuir.
James, the firstborn, and William and David were all medical practitioners in the Forfar area.
David died at the age of 24 of TB.
James practised as an MRCS in Forfar.
William Edward, a surgeon, practised medicine in Dunnichen and Carmyllie parishes.
Further information about him and his descendants can be found by clicking his name.