By the time my great-great-grandmother Mary Scott Mitchell died at age 75, she had been widowed twice and outlived four of her six children. And death by drowning would play a prominent role in her family’s story.
Mary was born 26 Oct 1834 in Dunnottar, a parish in Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, Scotland, to parents James Mitchell, a hand loom weaver, and Christian Smith.
“James Mitchel, weaver, in Stonehaven and Christian Smith his wife had a daughter born, and baptized in presence of Robert Mitchel and James Todd both there, and named Mary Scott”
(Robert Mitchell was James’ father, and James Todd was Christian’s step-father)
On 25 Jun 1855, 20-year-old Mary married John Longmuir, a merchant seaman, in Aberdeen. Like her father, Mary was then working as a hand loom weaver. Two years later, on 4 Jun 1857, Mary gave birth to a son, James Mitchell Longmuir.
The next few years would prove sad and stressful for Mary and her family.
On 6 Dec 1858, Mary’s paternal grandmother, Ann Adams (née Strachan), about 70 years old, accidentally drowned. Her body was found on a ledge of rocks not far from shore at Castle Haven, about two miles south of her home in Stonehaven, where she had gone to procure some bait. It was surmised that she had been knocked out after slipping on some rocks and then drowned when the tide came in.
(Ann Strachan was first married to Mary’s grandfather Robert Mitchell, a merchant seaman, and after his death married a fisherman named Robert Adam or Adams)
The sea would next claim Mary’s husband, less than a year after her grandmother’s death. On 26 Oct 1859, John Longmuir was among a crew of five on the schooner Bubona, headed from Sunderland, England, to Aberdeen with a load of coal. Just off Canty Bay, North Berwick, East Lothian, the vessel was wrecked in a gale. While the coastguard’s “Rocket Brigade” was able to fire a rope over the stern of the boat as it was breaking up, the crew was too exhausted to pull themselves to shore and, huddled together in the bow, they all drowned as a crowd watched helplessly from shore. This tragedy prompted the community to acquire its first lifeboat the following year.
Two bodies from the Bubona washed ashore in late November but it is likely John Longmuir’s body was never recovered as his death is not officially recorded in Scotland’s statutory death register.
The day her husband died was Mary’s 25th birthday, and she was seven months pregnant with their second child. She gave birth to a daughter, Dorothy Hawthorn Longmuir, on 8 Jan 1860 in Aberdeen.
Just four months later, on 13 May 1860, Mary suffered another tragedy with the loss of her three-year-old son from dropsy following a bout of scarlet fever. He was buried two days later in Aberdeen’s Spital Cemetery.
On 23 Aug 1863, Mary remarried. Her new husband was John Mitchell (no relation), another merchant seaman, and together they had four sons: John Todd Mitchell (8 Apr 1865), David Will Mitchell (29 Jul 1867), my great-grandfather Joseph Clark Mitchell (17 Mar 1871), and Alexander Duncan Calder Mitchell (1875).
Yet another sad loss came as son David, not yet three, died on 20 May 1871 of typhoid fever. Caused by a salmonella bacteria usually spread through contaminated food or water, typhoid can today be treated with antibiotics but prior to their use it was fatal in about 20% of cases.
The 1891 census finds Mary living with sons Joseph and Alex but without husband John who was then a patient in Aberdeen’s Royal Lunatic Asylum. He died there two years later on 29 May 1893, at age 55, having suffered from chronic Bright’s Disease, a kidney disease now known as nephritis. It is possible that kidney failure may have led to an accumulation of toxins in his body, causing delirium and resulting in his committal in the asylum.
The sea was once again the villain in 1900 when Mary’s son John Todd Mitchell, a cook on the trawler Hermes, was lost in the North Sea off Fair Isle, Shetland, when the ship disappeared in a gale. The trawler was one of five from Aberdeen that went missing in a mid-February storm and by the end of the month all hope had been abandoned for their dozens of crew members.
As had previously happened to her mother-in-law, John Todd’s wife, Euphemia, was pregnant when her husband died, giving birth to their third child, named John Todd Mitchell in memory of his father, in July that year. Sadly, the baby lived only eight weeks.
Mary was hit with yet another blow when her only daughter, Dorothy, died at age 46, on 31 Jan 1906. Her cause of death was the rather vague “disorder of menopause.”
She had now lost two husbands and four of her children, as well as four grandchildren who died in infancy (in 1887, 1899, 1900 and 1905; her descendants would eventually include another 21 grandchildren).
Mary herself succumbed on 29 Nov 1909, at age 75, after a bout of bronchitis. Her death certificate also records that for a year and a half she had suffered from neurasthenia, a now obsolete term for a psychological disorder characterized by physical and mental fatigue, depression, insomnia, and physical aches and pains—not surprising given all the sorrow she had endured in her life.
A final sad footnote to Mary’s story was the drowning death of yet another of her family, six years after her passing: her grandson Alexander, who lost his life to the sea in 1915.
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So sad and fascinating too Nancy.