Alexander Milne
Alexander Simpson Milne's ancestors mostly lived in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the north-east of Scotland. His grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers and agricultural workers (the men), while typical women's occupations were laundress, dressmaker and domestic servant. Alexander spent his career in Asia in the oil industry.
The Milnes
The earliest Milne ancestor I have discovered is Alexander's great-grandfather George Milne (b abt 1783) a farmer who married Helen Shand in 1810. They had seven children between 1811 and 1827.
Their fourth child was Alexander Milne (snr) born in 1817, who between 1850 and 1877 worked as a gamekeeper at Rothiemay in Banffshire. Alexander's first two children, according to the meticulous Scottish records, were:
Mary Susan, a "daughter in uncleanness", in 1846 - mother Jannet McRobert;
James, a "natural son", in 1850 (Alexander Simpson Milne's father) - mother Elspet or Elsie Murray.
Alexander (snr) married Isabella Anderson in 1851. There were six further children. He died in 1876.
An account of the 1961 census in Rothiemay (Rothiemay and the 1861 Census) includes:
Another family, who have moved down into the village from Rothiemay House, where they were living in 1851, is the Milnes. Alexander is from Kintore and is a gamekeeper on the House estate. His wife, Isabella, is from Mortlach. Children Mary, George, Hellen and John are all school-age or under.
James Milne is recorded in censuses from 1851 to 1881 as living with his mother and/or grandmother. By 1874, when he married Margaret Watt, he was an ironmonger in Glasgow. They moved to MacDuff, together with James' mother Elsie, following the 1881 census. She died there in 1887.
James died in MacDuff early in 1891. His illegitimacy is recorded on his death certificate. He left over £900 in his will, a large sum given his poor background. In the later 1891 census his widow Margaret described herself as having “private means”.
The Watts
I cannot find a birth or baptism record for Margaret Watt, who was Alexander Milne's mother. The certificate of her marriage to James Milne in 1874 records her parents as Alexander Watt and Isabella Paterson. Her date of birth is given, in census records from 1861, as about 1850.
Alexander Watt does not appear in the census returns: Isabella, and daughter Margaret, are living with Isabella’s sister in 1851; and in 1861 Isabella and Margaret are living alone. In both years Isabella is described as unmarried. Isabella married in 1871, to Alexander Simpson, a widower; was widowed and by 1901 had moved in with her (widowed) daughter Margaret. Presumably it was her husband's name that passed on to her grandson Alexander Simpson Milne.
Alexander Simpson Milne
Alexander Simpson Milne was born in MacDuff in 1889, and by the time of the 1901 census was living with his mother, grandmother, and six brothers and sisters in Cathcart, a residential suburb in the south of Glasgow.
Alexander attended Glasgow University and obtained a B Sc in engineering in 1911. His first position as an engineer appears to have been in Japan in 1912, to which he travelled overland by the Trans Siberian Railway. He was later posted to India where he met and married Kate Agnes Hewson in 1918. Their eldest child (Peggy) was born in Calcutta in 1919; their second (my mother Kitty) in Surabaya, Java (near the largest Indonesian oilfield), in 1920. They later returned to India, where Alexander retired in 1943, and subsequently moved to England.
Stanvac
For most (or all) of Alexander's professional career he was employed by companies that emerged following the break-up in 1911 of Standard Oil, one of the world's first and largest multinational corporations of which John D. Rockefeller was founder, chairman and major shareholder. Two of these companies, Jersey Standard and Socony-Vacuum, had interests in Asia which included oil fields in Indonesia and oil refineries in India; and in 1933 merged these interests into a joint venture: Standard-Vacuum Oil Co., or "Stanvac". Alexander became an employee. The joint venture was dissolved in 1962, by which time its interests in India and Indonesia had been nationalised. Jersey Standard was renamed Esso and then Exxon, and Socony-Vacuum renamed Mobil. These two descendents of Standard Oil merged in 1998.
The following album contains relevant photographs. The attachments comprise a tree of Alexander Milne's direct ancestors, as I have been able to establish them back in time; a family tree of his great-grandfather George Milne as I have been able to follow it forwards; and a summary of census records from 1841 to 1911.
https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipNVX3haH1uQRIPvWFLdxgozCzsFRc5h-KWbDylZ