Meet Wilhilmina Inkster Bruce/Campbell (1835-1896)

Robert Bruce and Wilhilmina Inkster

Wilhilmina Inkster (1835-1896) (pronounced "WILL-yum-EYE-na")(1) - Ella's great grandmother - was the only child of her parents William Inkster (a perfumer and hairdresser in Tain, Scotland) and Margaret Graham. (However, her father later had 3 children with his wife Ann Silcock (1823-1899)).

According to census records, by 1841 at age 5, Wilhilmina was living with her father (who was age 25) at High Street, in Tain. Her mother, Margaret, we assume passed away before this time - she's not listed in the census.(2) By 1851 Wilhilmina was living at 89 Commercial Street Lerwick, when she was 16 years old, supposedly with her aunt Elizabeth Walker (her father's sister?).(3) She must have gone to live with her aunt sometime after her mother passed away.

The Manor House in Burravoe, South Yell, Shetland,
where Robert and Wilhilmina lived

When she was 20 years old, Wilhilmina married Robert Bruce (1827-1865) on 1 May 1855 at the United Free Church of Scotland in Lerwick, on the main island of Shetland. He was 27 years old. Together, they had six children in their ten years of marriage, and for at least part of their marriage they lived in the Manor House in Burravoe on the island of Yell, Shetland, where he was a laird.

However, during their brief marriage, Robert also had 6 children with 5 other women (including one born just 2 months after Wilhilmina and Robert were married).

Of Wilhimina and Robert’s six children, it appears that she outlived 4 of them, and one passed away just a year after she did:

1. Robert Bruce (1857-1892; 35 years old. Passed away en route to Australia.)
2. William Bruce (1859-1860; 1 year old. Passed away from convulsions.)
3. William Alfred Bruce (1860-1897; 37 years old. Died in Australia.)
4. Ursilla Katherine Bruce (1862-1937; 74 years old. Deaf since childhood. This is Ella’s grandmother.)
5. David Bruce (1864-Unknown, but at least 1881 as he’s listed in the Edinburgh census for that year.)
6. Mary Margaret Robina Bruce (1865-1866; born one month before her father passed away; died just about 2 weeks shy of being 1 year old.)

Robert passed away in 1865, when Wilhilmina was 30 years old.(4) Five of their six children were alive at the time (with the youngest, Mary Margaret Robina being born a month before Robert’s death.

After Robert's death, Wilhilmina had another daughter (her seventh child) - Wilhelmina Johann Inkster. The father is unknown,(5) and it’s unknown how long she lived.

When Wilhilmina was aged 34, she married for a second time to 22-year old Duncan Campbell (1847-bef 1896; a slater/roof tiler by profession) on 24 February 1870 in Lerwick. Can we assume that her four or five living children joined the household with Duncan (Robert, William Alfred, Ursilla Katherine, David...and perhaps Wilhelmina Johann, if she were still living)?

Together, Wilhilmina and Duncan had one son, Alexander Campbell, born 25 November 1870 (her eighth child). According to the 1871 Census, they were living on Commercial Street in Lerwick. In 1881, they were at 1 Crooked Lane, Lerwick, and in 1891, at 3 Crooked Lane. (6) (See below for videos of Commercial St and Crooked Lane.)

It's unclear when Duncan passed away, but apparently sometime before 1896, before Wilhilmina. She passed away on 28 December 1896 on Crooked Lane when she was 61 years old. (7)

On our trip to Shetland in September 2014, we strolled along Commercial Street, and happened upon Crooked Lane as well, which is just off of Commercial Street, not far from Market Cross. Many of the buildings along Commercial Street seem to be original. Along Crooked Lane, however, it looked as though many had crumbled or been demolished, and there were either empty lots or newer homes that had been built. It was still intriguing, however, to walk through the quite narrow alley from Commercial Street, up Crooked Lane, imagining what life might have been like 150 years ago for these ancestors.

Market Cross, Commercial St, Lerwick - Sept 2014

Ella and cousin R cruising
Commercial St, Lerwick.
The narrow passage to Crooked Lane
is up on the right, just out of view in this
photo - Sept 2014

Crooked Lane, Lerwick. A quite narrow
passageway up steep steps  - Sept 2014

Crooked Lane, looking down toward
Commercial St and the harbor. (Date unknown - Image Source)

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Above are the facts that we can glean from available records. But as I’ve been compiling this biographical info, I yearn to know more! It seems as though life was filled with a lot of heartache for Wilhilmina - death, uncertainty, infidelity…all of which seemed a lot more common in that time period compared with today. That being said, I wonder what her outlook on life was like. Perhaps orphaned after her mother’s death, living with her aunt (a grocer), marries a laird (was such a leap in social class common?), lives in a very small community with her husband having children with five other women concurrently with her (not to mention women he might have had relations with that didn’t get pregnant), the deaths of several of her children, a child of her own out of wedlock, then marries a slater who is 12 years younger than herself after her first husband’s death (a step down in social class - did the Bruce family disown her?), and eventually buried in an unmarked grave. 

What brought her joy in life? What sustained her through the hard times? 

As far as I can tell, the only one of her 8 children whose lineage has continued is her oldest daughter’s, Ursilla Katherine Bruce (1862-1937), Ella’s grandmother, and the child who was deaf.(8)

When Ursilla was young, I imagine that Wilhilmina might have worried about and wondered what type of future her daughter would have with such a handicap and whether she would lead a meaningful life. But she did! Ursilla went on to marry (her husband also being deaf - John MacDonald Beattie, 1860-1936), have one child of her own (Ella’s mother, Ursula Katherine, who went by "Kate"), who had 2 children (Ella and her sister), and between those sisters, their posterity is over 100 strong (between Ella and her sister’s children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren)! 

I hope that Wilhilmina smiles down from heaven on us, seeing that conditions and relationships improve with each generation. Believing that family relationships endure beyond death, I look forward to meeting Wilhilmina some day and I can’t wait to ask her to fill in the blanks!

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Does Anyone Know...

• How might Robert and Wilhilmina have met?
• Who is the father of Wilhilmina's 7th child?
• I initially thought that Wilhilmina's parents weren't married as I haven't found any record of that yet, except I discovered that on the marriage registry entry for her and Duncan, it lists her parents as William Inkster and Margaret Inkster (M.S. Graham), confirming they were married. Anyone have any more info on this?
• Any additional sources we can reference here?

Notes:

1. There are many spelling variations in different records: Wilhelmina, Williamina, Inster, and more!
2. Source: http://www.bayanne.info/Shetland/getperson.php?personID=I9210&tree=ID1. Also see census scan for 1841, included below.
3. Shetland Family History lists the aunt's name as Elizabeth Walker, while familysearch.org lists it as Elizabeth Inkster (no record of a marriage in the latter source). (Source: http://www.bayanne.info/Shetland/getperson.php?personID=I9210&tree=ID1)
4. Robert apparently was “found dead in his bedroom.” (Source: http://www.bayanne.info/Shetland/getperson.php?personID=I9209&tree=ID1)
5. In fact, it looks like Wilhelmina Johann Inkster’s birth certificate was registered by a neighbor. Why? Interestingly, this daughter was born at 89 Commercial St, Lerwick, the same address at which Wilhilmina lived with her aunt before she married Robert. Did she move back with her aunt after Robert’s death?
6. Source: http://www.bayanne.info/Shetland/getperson.php?personID=I10400&tree=ID1
7. Source: http://www.jghalcrow.co.uk/bdm/deaths/pdf/Deaths_1897_ST.pdf
8. It’s unknown whether Ursilla was born with that condition or there was some sort of illness or accident that brought it on during her childhood.

1841 Census for Tain that Lists Williamina Inkster with Her father
William Inkster (Click to Enlarge)

Marriage Register Listing Wilhilmina Bruce Marrying Duncan Campbell
(Click to Enlarge)

To Generations Past, Present, and Future

While we were visiting Aberdeen with Ralph and Ella this past fall, I took the opportunity to deliver a tribute speech to Ella and her family. This was on 1 October 2014. I had originally written this for a public speaking class I was taking at the time, and it seemed appropriate to share it while we were sitting on a bench overlooking the River Dee. 

Although it's a tribute to generations past, it's also meant as a call to action for present and future generations, that "we too can do great things, GREAT THINGS, that will influence, for good, generations to come."

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"They're just trying to break our morale down," her mother would tell them when the air-raid sirens would go off, and the German Luftwaffe airplanes would start coming through. This was usually at night between 10 and 11 pm. Her parents, sister, and herself would jump into what they called siren suits (knit jumpsuits with a hood) and head to the bomb shelter that was built behind their tenement building. There they would wait until the "OK" signal was sounded.

This is what life was like for my grandmother during WWII in Aberdeen, Scotland.

After so many times of heading down to the shelter, especially on those harsh winter nights, Grandma's mother, declared (and I wish I could imitate her Scottish brogue!): "We'll sooner die of pneumonia than from a bomb." For the rest of the war, they would instead crouch under their kitchen  table - with pillows to rest their heads - when the sirens would sound, rather than in that cold and damp bunker.

Grandma was 5 years old when the war started in 1939. Throughout the 6 years of the war, until 1945, Aberdeen had 32 air raids (which doesn't sound like too many over 6 years) but they had 364 air raid warnings. In total, 365 bombs fell in their city. (Source)

The worst of it was the night of April 21, 1943, when between 40-50 bombers flew over Aberdeen. Those planes, coming from Norway, dropped 127 bombs, killed 125 people, and injured hundreds of others. (Source)

Was Grandma ever scared? She doesn't remember being so. Perhaps it was the naivete of youth, but most likely she was drawing upon the solidarity of her stalwart parents. They had such a strong faith in God, believing that they would be protected and all would be OK.

And protected they were. One story Grandma shares is of her father who was working late one night at the harbor fixing the trawler fishing boats. It was about 9pm, and his friends at work had gotten off the boat and invited him to join them at the pub. He said, 'Nope, I'm going home.' Tragically, that night, a bomb dropped on the pub and several of his friends were killed.

Grandma recalls a few other war experiences quite vividly:

• One day walking home from school, a German plane was flying incredibly low...and during the day. Usually they only flew over at night. But it was eerie how low he was, and Grandma could clearly see the iron cross emblem on the airplane's tail.
• A member of their church congregation had shards of glass embedded in her arms when a bomb dropped in her neighborhood. The blast of the bomb blew out the windows and sprayed the glass everywhere. She suffered from that injury for quite some time.
• Her parents sent her to stay on a farm in the countryside for a couple months one summer, to keep her safe outside of the city. One night, she and her host family watched what seemed like fireworks in the sky, but it was really probably the British artillery on the ground firing toward German bombers overhead. She wasn't worried for her own welfare; she was far enough out in the country that the planes didn't bother go there. But she was worried about her parents and older sister back home. 

"The Scots are tough," Grandma says. They certainly are!

These ancestors of ours continued to tap into those reserves of strength and toughness as they needed additional courage to face future challenges. 

You see, before war broke out, they were making plans to emigrate to America. They would leave their homeland, their family and friends and occupations, the comfort of a communal culture, to buy one-way tickets on an ocean liner.

It wasn’t fame or fortune that called to them...but religion.

Before the war, they had converted to the Mormon faith, which was a relatively unknown Christian religion in Scotland at the time. What was most important to them now was this faith, and they wanted to be close to others who believed similarly.

Although I have grown up as and am an actively practicing Mormon, I am in awe, and humbled, by the sacrifices our ancestors made, to more fully live what they believe.

Selling virtually all that they owned and traveling essentially with the clothes on their back, they waved goodbye to family as they boarded the train that took them to the ship harbor. Grandma was now 15 years old. The journey was so expensive and they had saved for so many years, they didn’t know if they’d ever return to their homeland. These were one-way tickets.

America didn’t necessarily offer them greener pastures, either literally (they settled in Arizona, after all) or figuratively: It’s no small task to start a new life from scratch. And they were sometimes ridiculed for their accent, and treated as second class citizens. 

Why did they do all this? I think about this often. The conclusion that I’ve come to is that I believe they had a vision of the future, of how their sacrifices would benefit generations to come. We are now standing on their shoulders.

We have that same blood coursing through our veins. And we can tap into that same strength and determination. We too can trust in God, and that he has a plan for our lives and he will direct us as we seek to know that plan. We can have courage in the face of hardships, as we ourselves face oceans and continents that separate us from our final destinations, and as we may sometimes find ourselves as strangers in a strange land.

We too can do great things, GREAT THINGS, that will influence, for good, generations to come.

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