Quarriers children shipped to Canada

By Kay McMeekin

Several members of the Marrs family from County Derry in  Ireland moved to Ayrshire.

Thomas Marrs married Esther McWhinnie (various spellings) in 1877 in Castle Dawson, Londonderry and in 1878 they were in Cumnock for the birth of their first child Mary, 11 months later. Thomas was an iron miner.

In 1889 Esther McWhinnie was left with 5 young children and pregnant with Daniel when husband Thomas Marrs died in a mining accident in Fife.  (This is quite some way from Cumnock.)   

2 years later in the 1891 census Esther is living with a George Phillips, 7 years her junior,  in Riccarton near Kilmarnock, Ayrshire  and her oldest child Mary Marrs and the two youngest boys William and Daniel. I can't find John in 1891 but in 1901 he is is New Cumnock, the adopted son of David and Lizzie Brown. Adoptions were informal affairs at this time.

Esther married George Phillips in 1892 in Cumnock. She is running a lodging house in Elbow Lane so hardly sounds destitute. Maybe the 3 boys were already with Quarriers.  Quarriers was a respectable institution known for taking in orphans. They would get clothed, fed and an education.  

In May 1895 Daniel age 6 and William age 8 are shipped to Canada on the Sarmatian along with many other children. Thomas went out a couple of  months earlier on a different ship, the Siberian.  The Home Children scheme of sending orphaned children to Canada was later discredited as many youngsters were treated as unpaid workers by their new families.  But their mother is still alive. She is named as next of kin on Thomas and Daniel's army records, so they clearly kept in touch. With so little information we should not judge.

 John married Lugar born Isabella Anderson 31/12/1908 at Mossmark Cottages, New Cumnock. They sailed from Glasgow on the Ionian 24/4/1909 heading for Montreal, Canada and settled in Nova Scotia before making their home in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. John died there in 1959 and Isabella in 1973.

Daughter Esther (Essie) sailed on the Sarmatian along with 120 other girls  from Quarriers, arriving in Quebec 6/6/1892. She was 9 years old and her final destination was Fairknowe Home, Brockville, Ontario. She was adopted by the Hodgins family in North Ontario. On 5/6/1907 she married John Gourlay Kirk McCartney in Fernie, British Columbia. John was born at the Haugh, Mauchline and had emigrated to Canada to escape a childhood of abuse. He was illegitimate, his birth mother being Agnes Kirk (sometimes Kirkland), a serving maid,  and he had been adopted by Cumnock born Jessie McMillan Moffat and her husband William McCartney, a Lanarkshire-born coalminer,  who had  married at the Townfoot, Cumnock 1/6/1877. By 1891 they had moved to Beath, Fife. The couple adopted  four children, Alex, John, Annie and George. According to a letter written by John G K McCartney to his son John, these adoptions involved ‘quite a sum of money’ passing hands. John was unaware that he was adopted until his mother spitefully told his new wife. He did not know who his birth mother was, or what his two middle initials stood for,  until he was 70 years old and had to apply for his birth certificate to get his old age pension. He also found out at that time that his biological father was a well-to-do cattleman who ‘presumably paid his adoptive mother a certain sum to adopt him’.

Essie and John went back to Scotland, to East Wemyss, Fife six months after their marriage where two babies, Jessie and Esther, were born and died between 1908 and 1909. Son John was born there in 1910 and they returned to Nanaimo in 1912 where Ellen and Donald were born. They then returned to Fife where Mary and Annie were born and they were back in Canada by 1921. Both Essie and John died in Vancouver, BC - Essie in 1952 and John in 1964.

More about Quarriers here

More about Daniel Marrs DCM here