FAMILY HISTORY

This map of North and East Ayrshire (and some parts of south Renfrewshire) shows family locations centred on the towns of Kilmarnock, Irvine, Galston, Kilwinning and Beith; it also shows the old parish borders, as they existed prior to the 20th Century. Place names in Bold text are sites associated with our direct ancestors, while those in Italics are for extended family connections.

Most of our Scottish families have at sometime or other had connections with Ayrshire, making this area the closest we can come to a significant ‘heartland’ for our ancestors. The area is particularly central to the stories of the Brown (paternal), McKay, Brown (maternal), Galt and Howie families, even though most of our direct ancestors eventually migrated to the melting pot of Glasgow before some headed for the New World (United States and Australia).

You will notice that the Parish of Kilwinning has a very large number of  places associated with Robyn’s Galt and Howie ancestors. To make that area easier to navigate, I have provided a more detailed map of that parish below.  This map also has appended dates to give the reader a sense of when those places were lived in by our forebears. The earliest ‘dated’ record we have is from 1683, the year Margaret Murchland was born in Kilwinning. She married John Galt in 1699 at Kilmaurs (see map above). The earliest in the ‘Howie’ line was 1717, when William Reid of Broomhill married Martha Reid of Waterside (probably cousins) — these are Robyn’s 6g-grandparents. Also of note is Margaret Howie’s birth at Burnbrae in 1774, and Gabriel [3] Galt’s birth at Doura in 1795. This couple (Robyn’s 3g-grandparents) married at Kilwinning in 1818, but immediately moved to Glasgow — the rest is history.