My great-grandfather Thomas Pottinger (1851–1927) moved from the Shetland island of Burra to north-east England to become a master mariner in the merchant navy. Thanks to recent work on Scottish censuses carried out at TheGenealogist I now have in a single place first-hand information on his early life and the lives of his parents James (c.1809–1883) and Grace (1813–1881). Placed alongside other primary source material from the Shetland Archives and The National Archives, this information has provided me with a story worth sharing.

Thomas Pottinger was nine at census time in 1861 and living with his parents, three brothers and a sister at Duncansclate – a hamlet on the southern tip of West Burra. Already four older brothers were away from home. George (born 1832) was captain of a record- breaking full rigged ship, the Ocean Bride, which sailed out of the Tyne and Wear. William (b.1834) was studying for his master mariner’s ticket at the newly opened Marine College near the Tyne after years at sea. Laurence (b.1837) was probably away fishing for cod on the Burra-based Prince of Wales, in which he was a shareholder. James junior (James Innes b.1846) was bosun of the Arnison of Dundee and about to study for his mate’s certificate in North East England. (See box.) Brothers Charles and John are at home and ‘fishermen’ while Thomas and Walter were likely to be at the island’s school. (In William’s master’s record there is evidence for a school on the island.) By 1861 Shetlanders were already regarded as competent sailors and much in demand to serve in merchant navy vessels based on the mainland.

My great-great grandfather James, father of these eight boys and a single girl, is described as a fish curer in 1861. This was a position of some importance on an island dominated by fishing. He had already ‘done the hard yards’ at sea as a young man. Burra was run by a fishing company which carried out its own censuses in the 1830s, revealing that James was ‘away in the Davis Straits’. This was probably on Hull-based whalers which called in to Shetland to pick up crew. The Burra ledgers of the company (see box) also have him buying equipment and building up credit both for the cod fishing off the Faroes and that in the waters around Shetland. This was from the 1840s to the 1860s.

By the 1871 census, Thomas, now 20, was an able-bodied seaman and serving on a vessel called the Kooria Mooria registered in Greenock. His seaman’s record and newspapers of the time both indicate that this vessel had problems while Thomas was on board. The core of the Pottinger family remained at Duncansclate with John now married and father to two infant girls. Ann was still unmarried and at home while Laurence was not at sea – probably waiting on a summer trip to the Faroes. By now John was one of the most successful fishing skippers on Shetland with newspapers regularly reporting his return from the Faroes with record catches of cod (see box). By 1871 the parents were linked to crofting alone. James (now 60) seems to have retired from the sea but Grace would have been a crofter’s wife all her married life. This was no easy occupation. The crofts on Burra were rented from the fishing company acting as ‘factors’ for the owners on the mainland. Land on Burra was not good and it was difficult to get by through subsistence farming, keeping animals and cutting peat. Conditions improved as a result of Royal Commissions carried out in the late Victorian period. Interviewed at one of these commissions, fellow islander and relative Walter Williamson put the women’s role into perspective, noting;

‘The poor women work a good deal harder than many of the rich men’s horses. No true gentleman would work his horse so hard as our wives are wrought, and we must needs do that to make a credible living.’

Duncansclate was still Thomas’s home in 1871. He was 20 and unmarried. When he did marry (at Lerwick, the Shetland capital, in 1878) he gave a different address. By then the core of the family had moved to a single isolated croft on land still known as the ‘Taing of Houss’. This was on Houss Island – still part of Burra but further east. This address is on Thomas’s marriage certificate.

Grace died early in 1881 just prior to the census, leaving James with son John and family on the Taing. James’s unmarried half-sister Hugans was also there. James is now described as a mason. Building repairs were carried out to the crofts but it seems that the factors gave little in the way of compensation for work done – a complaint often taken to the Royal Commissioners. Thomas was now married to a Burra girl called Janet Inkster, who described herself as a ‘knitter’ on her marriage certificate – an occupation followed later by a number of John’s daughters and indeed large numbers of Shetland females. Shetland shawls and gloves were highly prized although, as revealed yet again in Royal Commissions, these were produced under conditions verging on slavery. By 1881 Thomas had become part of the flow away from the islands. He, his wife and young family, were boarding with relatives in South Shields on the River Tyne as he sat his master’s examination. His wife’s Shetland-born uncle also kept a pub in the same square. Here my direct Shetland ancestry comes to an end. My grandmother Grace Ann Pottinger was born in South Shields a year later – just two years after the move from Burra. Back at the Taing James died in 1883 and son John and many of his family moved to Eburne, Vancouver, close to what is now the airport. There seem to be descendants in the vicinity today. Laurence alone kept up links with Burra. He died at the Taing of Houss in 1917.