Summer Vacation - Day 9

We traveled to Selkirk today with the purpose of exploring the textile mill sites. During our prior research day in Hawick, I had focused my research on a man named John Grieve who had emigrated, along with his widowed mother and younger sister, on the same ship as the widowed Betty Vair Hart and her children. This John Grieve had later married our ancestress Eliza Hart’s older sister and upon her death married a second sister! I located him and his mother and sister living in Selkirk in the 1841 census on Dunsdale road and previously located biographical data had told that he went to work in the mills at age 10. He was in his teens during the 1841 census, was listed as a weaver and I located the names of 3 separate mills on Dunsdale Road – surely he had worked at one or perhaps all of them in turn prior to emigrating to Boston.
Most of the mills along Dunsdale road had long since been demolished but we found Ettrick Mill to still be standing and they had several old engravings in their public office of what the mills along Dunsdale road used to look like. As my Whittaker ancestors were also textile mill workers – albeit in Lancashire, England – I was much interested in exploring what I could.
From Selkirk, we returned to Carterhough Farm to take pictures as my camera batteries had died the day before and I did not have extras with me. (Stupid!) We returned to Melrose by noon as Dale had an appointment at the Masonic Lodge to look through their old records. I begged off and spent the afternoon by myself exploring Melrose on my own.