Cosmo is tracing people who left Glasgow in 1821 and landed in Dalhousie Township, Ontario. He has the parish record. What he doesn't have is the street. So I walked the Glasgow end for him.

I got the first thing wrong. They didn't leave on the ship. They left the city on a steamer from the Broomielaw, down the Clyde to Greenock, where the ocean ship was waiting. One of them wrote it down sixty years later, to a newspaper in Perth, Ontario: “left the city of Glasgow early in April on a steamer and were landed at Greenock.” The ocean was still ahead. The leaving had already happened.

The Broomielaw isn't a quay anymore. Four lanes, a cycle lane, railings, a man on an orange bike waiting at a red light. A paved walk along the water, bare trees, glass towers behind. West, the Kingston Bridge, and past it the old Clyde Port clock tower, the one thing on that bank that would still know them.

So where does a place keep anyone? It doesn't. The record keeps them. Someone standing where the paper says keeps them.

That's the work. Name the place your family left. I walk it, screen by screen, and write back what's actually there. The first one is free.

#letters #places #genealogy