Tracing Female Residents
In the nineteenth century, few upper- or middle-class women had any public role, and thus there is far less archival material relating to women’s lives. So tracing detail about female residents can be much more difficult.
For a married couple living in the property, only the husband's name will be listed. However, information about the wife and children can often be traced from census returns, marriage and birth records, and general searches.
Some married woman will be listed as the resident in cases where the family's main house was elsewhere or the husband was serving abroad, and she resided in Edinburgh for the birth of her child or to oversee the schooling of her children or for other reasons.
Where a woman is recorded as the resident, the entry seldom will include a Christian name or an occupation - the great majority of female residents of New Town houses had no formal occupations. Thus entries will often simply be, as shown in this extract, ‘Miss Farqhharson' or 'Mrs Farqhharson'.
Someone recorded as 'Miss' will always have been an unmarried woman.
Some general presumptions can be made as a starting point. Women listed in the street directories as the resident and designated as Mrs will be, in the majority of instances, widows and their surname that of their deceased husband. If, helpfully, the resident of a house changes from Mr Surname to Mrs Surname this usually will be due to the death of the husband.
In this Street Directory extract, both Mrs Farquharson and George Farquharson are recorded as resident at 27 Albany Street. In the 19th c. it would be exceptional for a man and wife both to be recorded as resident at the same address. Thus, in such a case it is likely to relate to a mother and son.
Where there is some other detail - such as this entry for ‘Mrs Hunter of Blackness’ - this can provide a starting point for a google search. Thus, searching for 'Hunter of Blackness' brings up useful information about the Hunter family. From this material it appears that Mrs Hunter could either be the widow of David Hunter of Blackness, who died in 1809 (married in 1770) or of David Hunter’s son, Alexander Gibson Hunter, who died in 1812 (married 1800). As the street directories showed that Mrs Hunter moved to Queen Street and lived there until 1842 and no other directory entry appears after this, it is likely that she died around this time. Thus it is more likely that she was Alexander’s widow.
The census returns can be helpful in confirming whether a female resident is a widow or married. Also her age, place of birth, names of children, etc. can assist in tracing. If recorded as married, as in this example for Lucy Robertson, but no husband recorded, then that will normally mean the husband was elsewhere on the census date. In Lucy Robertson’s case her husband , a civil engineer, was abroad on business. With perseverance, tenacious diverse searches, cross-checking, luck and guesswork, you may be able to work out a female resident’s identity. However, especially with common surnames such as Brown, it may be impossible to identify the woman in spite of dedicated and astute searching.