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I have posted previous messages regarding my Tait ancestry; however, I have since been able to amass a considerable amount of information regarding my Scottish heritage. As is to be expected, I have run into a bit of a roadblock which prevents me from stating unequivocably that the man I believe was my maternal grandmother's father is the right one for the following reasons. Although I have been able to find the marriage certificate for James Tait and Annie Heslin, a birth certificate for my grandmother, and a death certificate for Annie Tait, I was unable to locate a death certificate for my great-grandfather, James. Even a contact that I had with the Scottish government records office was unable to locate a death certificate for him, which puzzled me greatly. The little warning bells going off (or the "tingling of my spider senses") was my initial reaction to who Grandma Mary listed as her next of kin on the passenger manifest for the ship that she sailed to Canada on because it only gave her mother's name. My spider senses were set off once again when I saw my grandmother's death certificate because only her brother's name (James Heslin) is mentioned. I immediately wondered why James Tait was not mentioned (at that point, I was assuming he was alive because Scottish government records are only available up to 1956), except to say that she was married to James Tait, General Laborer. In addition, what also muddles everything up is that I believe James' father's name was Cornelius Fortune Tait and that his mother's name was Agnes Baird; however, on James and Annie's marriage certificate, the registrar wrote down Cornelius' name as John and his mother's maiden name as Doull. I believe what might have happened in the case of Cornelius is that because "Conn" is a common nickname for Cornelius, perhaps he heard the name as "John", so that's what he put down. But mixing up "Doull" with "Baird" - well - your guess is as good as mine! So, after many futile attempts to locate another possibility for James' mother and father, I sat down one day and entered just his name at Ancestry.com determined to wade through everything and everybody that had anything to do with James Tait. Well, lo and behold! Up pops an entry stating that a James Tait, with all of the criteria that matches the man whom I believe to be my great-grandfather, had married one Nellie Pollard from Suffolk, England in Winnipeg, Manitoba on August 30th, 1913, exactly four days shy of his second daughter's third birthday (James and Annie had two little girls - Mary, my grandmother, and Agnes, although she was called Addie all of her life), meaning that he abandoned Annie and his little girls some time between September 3, 1910, when Aunt Addie was born, and August 30th, 1913, when he married Nellie Pollard. So, given that there is no Scottish death certificate for the man that I believe to be my great-grandfather, which means that he did not die in Scotland, that fact also points to his being a wife deserter. Up until then, I had always believed that my Grandma Mary left Scotland hoping to secure a better life for herself than the one that she probably would have had there. Now, I wonder if her true motive for emigrating was to try and locate her father at the urging of her mother here in Canada. As a Tait/Emblau (Emblau was my mother's maiden name) woman, I know first-hand that the women in this family love long and deeply. My purpose in attempting to verify this information is merely so that I can complete my family tree. There is no point in going back any further until I can somehow verify that the James Tait who died in the 1950's in Winnipeg, Manitoba (I even know where he and his "wife" are buried) is indeed my great-grandfather. Of course, exposing his "dirty little secret", which he probably thought would die with him, would give me a small measure of satisfaction for my great-grandmother's sake, but my primary goal is to determine once and for all if this man was my great-grandfather. I have been in contact with a descendant of his through his second "wife" Nellie Pollard. Although she admits that there were mysteries surrounding the James Tait that she was told about, my last e-mail to her has gone unanswered. Please - I am begging for someone to come forward and admit that James Tait deserted Annie and the girls, and that the James Tait who is buried in Winnipeg, Manitoba is my great-grandfather.
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