On Friday 3 October 1913, members of the Easton clan threw a party in the Good Templars’ Hall, Carluke, Scotland. A now anonymous poet in the family captured the celebrations on papers which had ‘formed divisions in a Rountree’s chocolate box’. Among those present at this ‘rare affair’ was a former compositor who was probably responsible for collecting the papers at the end of the evening and getting the verses printed professionally.

Over a century, the poem changed from treasured memories into an enigma. When I eventually discovered it in a box of old photographs, everyone who could have explained the allusions was dead. As I had already done some research into this branch of the extended family, and recognised a few of the names, I decided to see how much of that evening I could bring back to life.

The opening stanzas contained what has until recently been another mystery. The party was held for ‘Mrs Donald Shaw’, but who was she? It is clear that she had left Carluke in July 1899, had returned to visit her family without her man around the end of 1912, and was now close to setting sail back to her new home. Until recently, shipping records provided only frustrating blanks under any known family surname. All that was certain was that Isabel and Janet, two daughters of Tom Cassells and his wife, Isobel Easton, could not be identified on censuses after 1891. It was clear from the poem that a third daughter, Bessie, who had also emigrated, was not Mrs Shaw.

The value of revisiting brick walls was demonstrated vividly when a re-trawl of online shipping records located details of Isabel and Bessie Cassells sailing from Glasgow to New York in July 1899. An Isabel Shaw had also docked at Glasgow in October 1912, having sailed from New York. Whether she settled in the Big Apple, travelled further into the USA or crossed into Canada is unknown. Records have not yet yielded any hint of her marriage to Donald Shaw, and if she happened to be a widow at that point, making an identification would be very difficult.

The next verses were about ‘cousin Tom from Barnsley’, who was our direct ancestor. We already had plenty of information about this branch of the family and the poem confirmed the universal respect the extended family had for Tom’s father, William Lang, Crimean veteran and ‘th’owd veteran of Redan’. Also fascinating was hearing his wife speaking of him as ‘her ain guid man’.

Confirming some other attendees initially meant checking BMD and census records. Scottish records are available via the ScotlandsPeople website, whose indexes can be consulted for free. For this piece of research, the indexes proved sufficient to fill in a few gaps in my knowledge. Unfortunately, these sources were no help in identifying the people who were described but not named.

The next challenge was to locate any additional information beyond what had come down a couple of generations as oral history within our branch. Initially this proved disappointing. Family history websites can produce useful contacts, but often researchers, however interested, have no information about names in their tree, beyond what is available in BMD and census records. The sole success through this route, but a significant one, was through a man who knew nothing about the poem but supplied helpful detail about his branch of the family. This included a broken marriage and some children who had emigrated to Canada, enabling me to exclude them as possible attendees. The gentleman also recalled that as a child he had been taken to a Carluke sweet shop that belonged to members of the family.

As new records become available, further breakthroughs can often be made in family history. Searching the Carluke and Lanark Gazette online moved the research forward in several ways. An advertisement for the sweet shop reveals that it stocked Rowntree’s chocolate and presumably had supplied the confectionery eaten at the party. It also identified the proprietors, Jane Easton and Isabella Gilchrist, a couple of ladies who were not mentioned in the verses. These sisters would probably have attended, alongside their siblings and cousins.

I had hoped that Mrs Shaw’s visit home would have been noted in the Gazette, but it had not. However, searching for family surnames disclosed that ‘yon wee ex-precentor man’ was David Easton. The newspaper contained several reports about his involvement in church music and leading local choirs for over forty years.

‘Cousin Kate of Crossford fame’ had been asked to sing a popular ballad. I had previously inferred that she was Kate Gilmour. A few reports of Gilmour sisters singing at local gatherings added weight to the provisional identification.

Through several years of the local newspaper I was able to discover the future lives of several of the guests who remained in Carluke, fill in missing dates on the family tree and better understand relationships of kith and kin in what had always been a large but close family.

The poem also captured many vivid details from the evening and the personalities of some family members. A crying baby was ‘heard but barely seen’. Two young children were left on a rug, where they amused themselves by decorating the dog in with ‘a mile or two of ribbon’. Older ones were apparently engaged in a game of hide and seek. Mr Prentice, an authority on dentistry, held forth about a painful procedure where a patient ‘let the dentist ken, he wasna meant for saint’. Cousin Jim clearly had a very outgoing personality as his ‘merry wit’ was noted, even though he was not able to be there.

The menu still makes the mouth water. A branch of the family who were involved in catering had provided meat pies, and chipped potatoes. Another branch were market gardeners and had brought choice fruits in the form of ‘some fine, juicy Brookbank grapes and Crossford-grown tomatoes’.

An unidentified pianist played for the dancers and singers, but good things come to an end and with family members already scattered across lowland Scotland, England and North America, the last verse about their imminent parting recognises that some of them would never meet again. It is especially poignant because, on that autumn evening, no one could have guessed that a year later the country would be at war in Europe. It is likely that 12-year-old James Easton MacFarlane was one of the youngsters who were playing hide and seek. In October 1918, aged 17, he died of pneumonia while a sailor on active service and is the youngest man named on the Carluke war memorial.

As well as recording a small slice of family history and giving a glimpse of Carluke in 1913, the poem also reflects the time in which it was set. Initially surprised by a negative reference to the NSPCC, I began to look further into child welfare at this time. I have discovered nothing to suggest that any of the family had been noticed by the society but the poet certainly subscribed to a view held at the time that the society was sometimes responsible for parents being punished for their poverty.

The quick wit of the anonymous poet, who noticed and rhymed many details from the party, and the thoughtful input of the person who added the sentences on the front and back of the printed version have left a fascinating insight into the relationships of a close-knit family whose bonds held true into the second half of the 20th century. If they considered their party was a ‘rare affair’, who are their descendants to disagree?