The Tide That Turned Both Ways — How the Research Was Done

This entry establishes Elizabeth’s parents — James Gray and Elizabeth Littlejohn — and her Monymusk origin, the anchor that later outweighs every American misstatement of her birthplace. The entry sits on a retrospectively attested page (attestation dated 1855) beneath an 1845 year heading, with baptism on 14 March 1846 — implying birth on 25 December 1845, while the family gravestone reads December 25, 1846. The one-year question is logged in the source inventory for resolution; it does not affect her identity, which the parents’ names and the Newcrofts census fix beyond doubt.

Five years before her marriage, Elizabeth is documented in her father’s six-acre croft household — born Monymusk, still a scholar. The census age (16 in April 1861) is one more datum bearing on the birth-year question noted above. How a crofter’s daughter from rural Aberdeenshire came to meet a Perthshire mason’s son in Dundee remains undocumented; the marriage itself is what every later record points back to.

This is the first link in the marriage-citation chain that makes the entire case provable. The 1866 June 23 Dundee citation recorded here will reappear, verbatim, on two Glasgow entries nine and eleven years later — connecting the returning family to this couple and no other. This first William died before 1870; the family would reuse his name for the son born in Maryhill during the return.

The first American record. Two American-born daughters fix the emigration window at c. 1868–69; the Scottish-born first son William is absent, having died in infancy. David’s stated age of 25 understates his 1842 birth — the first of many small numeric slippages in this family’s American records, none of which disturbs the identification.

Two findings beyond the bracket itself. First, this return records the father’s full name — David Paterson Robertson — the documentary basis for his middle name, echoed in the son’s name and pointing toward his mother Margaret’s Paterson maiden name. Second, the birth date here is May 27, 1874 — a contemporaneous record returned within three days by the attending physician. George’s 1919 death certificate would later state May 8; the conflict is resolved in favor of this return (see the 1919 record below).

The record that proves the return. Twenty-three months after George’s birth at 119 Hamilton Avenue, the same couple — identified by the 1866 Dundee marriage citation and the father’s own signature as informant — registers a son in industrial Glasgow. This William, the only child of the sojourn to survive to adulthood, carries his Scottish birthplace and 1878 immigration year through every later American record, becoming the family’s walking corroboration of the journey.

The second linchpin, with the marriage citation at its clearest: “1866 June 23rd, Dundee” — matching the 1867 Dundee entry verbatim. The daughter was named Elizabeth Gray for her mother, almost certainly because the first Brooklyn-born Elizabeth had died; this second Elizabeth would also die young. Within months of this registration the family re-crossed the Atlantic. This entry is the last Scottish record of the household.

The corroborating arithmetic. The parents report 1870 — the first arrival. Their Scottish-born son, in his own household, reports 1878 — the re-emigration. Neither informant was documenting a migration; each was answering a routine census question a generation later. The two answers are inexplicable together except by the return the Glasgow registers prove. Elizabeth’s “11 born, 6 living” sets the family’s full arithmetic of loss — corroborated by Joseph’s “child No. 10” in 1884.

Two clarifications emerge from reading the documents together. July 7 is the burial date at Evergreens, from the death certificate; July 17 is the probate filing, from the Surrogate’s Court cover — two distinct events ten days apart, previously conflated. And Evergreens was only Elizabeth’s first resting place: Green-Wood’s records show her reinterment there on October 26, 1902 (see the cemetery group below).

David’s final appearance in a Brooklyn census: still a mason at 62, widowed three years, living with his youngest son, his eldest daughter, and a granddaughter. Within roughly a year he would leave four decades of stone cutting for the Georgia swamps. No record explains the decision; the next document in the file is a newspaper appeal for information about his whereabouts.

Ten years after the 1900 entry, an entirely separate enumeration repeats the same answer: born Scotland, immigrated 1878. Two censuses, one consistent immigration year, matching the Maryhill birth and the late-1878 re-emigration to the year. This census was taken in April 1910 — two months after William’s father vanished in Georgia, and weeks after his brother Alexander’s death.

The article supplies what no vital record does: the circumstances of David’s February 1910 disappearance, his age and middle initial, the swamped boat, the money he was known to carry, and Joseph’s exhausted search. No death record was ever created — David Paterson Robertson has no grave. The man whose return migration this case proves left the record the same way he crossed the Atlantic in 1875: without a document marking the passage.

The timing — the youngest son dying weeks after the father’s disappearance — cannot be causally established from the records, but the duplicated pathology can be documented: his brother George would die nine years later of the same gastric ulcer complications, a possible hereditary condition or occupational hazard of the stone trade.

The birth date matches the Maryhill register to the day — forty-two years on. The employer line, “D. P. Robertson,” is the family firm carrying the father’s name and initials, operated by William’s brother David Lincoln: brothers in the trade their father and grandfather practiced. One inconsistency is noted for the record: the card marks William native-born despite his documented Maryhill birth — one more instance of this family’s Americanized self-reporting, resolved by the statutory register and his own census answers.

Two details serve the evidence analysis. The death certificate’s age at death (39 years, 4 months, 7 days) computes precisely to a September 7, 1884 birth — locking onto Certificate No. 8523 and overriding the certificate’s own miswritten birth year. And the father’s birthplace is given as “Edinborough Scotland” — a third birthplace variant for Blairgowrie-born David, joining “U.S.” in the catalog of informant improvisations this family’s records required the research to resolve.

Every one of the six surviving children’s death records names the same two parents, born Scotland — five independent late-life confirmations of the couple the 1866 Dundee marriage citation identified at the start. The proof structure built in Scotland in 1867 still holds in New Jersey in 1948.

Seventy-seven years of one family in one grave’s footprint: the mother who crossed the Atlantic three times, the son who searched Georgia for his father, the Maryhill-born son who carried the return in his census answers, his wife, and his son. The gravestone’s “Born Dec. 25, 1846” is the latest-made statement of Elizabeth’s birth date and stands in the birth-year question logged at the Monymusk baptism above. David himself is the absence in this plot — the only member of the household with no grave anywhere.

The office search explains why the patriarch and matriarch have no stones: Pathside is an untitled, unmarked section. It also delivers two analytical details. Margaret Paterson Robertson appears in the cemetery’s own ledger as “Margaret Robinson” — the Robinson variant reaching even into burial records, eight years after the same variant on Joseph’s birth certificate. And a James P. Robertson, buried 1906 in a Nazareth lot, surfaces as a new lead — the middle initial P., in this family, has a documented meaning.