Joseph Greenock

My grandmother’s grandfather’s grandfather (or my 4th great-grandfather) was a Scottish man named Joseph Greenock.

• Joseph Greenock (1790-) and Elizabeth Callendar (1791-) had a son,
• John Greenock (1819-1893), who with Rebecca Durie (1816-1876) had a son,
• Robert Greenock (1844-1906), who with Jane Redpath (1848-1947) had a son,
• John Greenock (1870-1947), who with Flora Rebman (1877-1958) had a daughter
• Helen Greenock Jackson (1903-1990), who was my grandmother.

Birth and Parents

There is no record of Joseph's birth, except that he was consistent in listing his birthplace as Linlithgow, and his birthdate as approximately 1790.

Linlithgow was and still is a small town between Glasgow and Edinburgh, about 30 miles from Glasgow and 20 miles from Edinburgh. Its High Street runs along Linlithgow Loch, and the primary feature of the town is Linlithgow Palace, the birthplace of James V and Mary Queen of Scots. Linlithgow was the seat of the historic county it resides in, now called West Lothian but previously called Linlithgowshire. There's much more on Linlithgow here.

It seems possible to estimate a birth date for Joseph through his military records. He is recorded as enlisting on January 31, 1808, and it was also noted that he served 131 days underage, i.e. before he turned 18 years old. Based on that, we can calculate a birth date of June 10, 1790. That is a tidy bit of math, but it conflicts with other military records. For example, he is listed as 26 on April 1, 1815, which would put his birthday some time before April 1, 1789. Also, when they calculated his length of service they didn’t deduct those 131 days, which was the whole point of counting those days in the first place.

Linlithgow, even considering the whole parish, wasn’t that large. According to surviving (digitized) records, there were only two couples having kids named Greenock in all of Linlithgow during this period. The first couple was Joseph Greenock and Helen Forgie, who were married in 1794; too late to be parents of our Joseph.

The second couple was John Greenock and Margaret Reid, who were married in 1776 in the parish of Muiravonside, a few miles east of Linlithgow. They had children there 1777-1781, and then in Linlithgow 1787-1792. John and Margaret had a child Margaret in March 1790, which conflicts with John’s calculated birthday, but that calculated birthday is suspicious anyway. There is no surviving record of Joseph’s birth, to this couple or any other.

Sometimes it’s possible to link families together through distinctive names passed down generations. Among the four known children of Joseph, there is a John and a Margaret, the same as those putative parents. That's interesting, but those names are so popular in this period that we can’t read too much into it.

Extended Family

Despite knowing practically nothing about Joseph’s parents, we do have a few hints about his extended family. John Greenock (1870-1947, Joseph’s great-grandson) in The Greenock Record recalled that as a five-year-old he met two cousins of his grandfather John Greenock (1819-1893):

As I have stated I met as a boy in 1875 Robert Greenock a jeweler and William Greenock, a shoemaker both cousins of Grandfather John Greenock. Robert died leaving no family. William was known as the man with the large family 18 all told his first wife brought him two children his second wife 16.

He goes on to note that one of William’s descendants is James Stewart Greenock of Kearny, New Jersey, his correspondent in a series of letters. From James we can work backward to find William Greenock (1823-1894), a Glasgow shoemaker in the 1870s who was born in Linlithgow and had at least 13 children, 3 with his first wife and 10 with his second.

Unfortunately, we don’t know much more about this William’s parents. His death certificate in 1894 lists his parents as William, another shoemaker, and Jemima Callendar. If this is indeed the same William, and he was indeed a first cousin to John Greenock (1819-1893), then William’s father (also William) would have been Joseph’s brother. It is worth noting that John Greenock and Margaret Reid, the potential parents of Joseph, had a child named William in Muiravonside in 1781.

I haven’t found anything further on William and Jemima.

The Peninsular War

Joseph was a 5’7”, almost 18-year-old shoemaker when he enlisted in the 94th Regiment of Foot in Dumfries. Among Joseph’s fellow soldiers was a young man named John Durie, from Renfrew, who had enlisted the previous year. Thirty years later their children would marry, and they were therefore both my fourth great-grandfathers.

Voluntarily enlisting in the army implies that the harsh life of the soldier in that era seemed preferable to whatever prospects faced Joseph and John as they entered adulthood. The Army generally attracted what the Duke of Wellington referred to as “the scum of the Earth”, but in Scotland in particular, an economic collapse saw many skilled artisans enlist.

Joseph Greenock saw extensive action in the Peninsular War in Portugal and Spain, fighting under the command of the future Duke of Wellington against the occupying forces of Napoleon. This is exactly the setting of the Richard Sharpe novels and television series; Joseph was in the 94th Regiment and Sharpe was in the 95th, and the two participated in many of the same engagements. That’s likely where the similarity ends; Sharpe’s derring-do earned him promotion and fame, whereas Greenock started and ended his career as a private.

An example of a
Military General Service Medal,
in this case with 5 clasps

We know a little about Joseph’s personal experience in the war because in 1848 the British government issued a commemorative Military General Service Medal to all surviving veterans of the campaigns of the era. The medal’s ribbon had a clasp for each major engagement the soldier participated in, which means that the army had to gather and record that information for each individual soldier. In Joseph’s case there was some family lore about his list of engagements being incomplete; see Joseph Greenock’s Military Career for more on that.

Joseph Greenock's entry in the Campaign and Award Rolls, showing 8 engagements

According to later accounts, Joseph received a medal with ten clasps, after some wrangling. The official Military Campaign Medal and Award Roll lists eight engagements:

• The Battle of Fuentes d'Onoro, May 1811
• The Siege of Cuidad Rodrigo, January 1812
• The Siege of Badajoz, March 1812
• The Battle of Salamanca, July 22 1812
• The Battle of Vitoria, June 21, 1813
• The Battle of Nivelle, November 10, 1813
• The Battle of Orthez, February 27, 1814
• The Battle of Toulouse, April 10, 1814

A total of 21 different clasps were awarded for engagements in the Peninsular War, and eight for engagements in the War of 1812 and other conflicts. The most any single soldier received was 15. The total of eight (or ten, as later stories had it) that Joseph Greenock received was very high. Paging through the award roll, only a few soldiers had a similarly eventful war. John Durie did not receive a medal, possibly because the medals were not awarded posthumously.

The 25th Regiment of Foot

On 3 Feb 1815 Joseph Greenock was discharged from the Army in Wexford, Ireland, having completed his “limited” service of seven years. Apparently he hadn’t had enough, because less than two months later, on April Fools Day, he re-enlisted in the Army, this time joining the 25th Regiment of Foot in Edinburgh for unlimited (i.e. lifetime) service. But the wars were now over, and Napoleon was deposed and in exile. The 25th Regiment of Foot, during this period called The King’s Own Borderers, was on garrison duty.

On 5 Feb 1816, Joseph married Elizabeth Callendar in Glasgow.

Joseph Greenock Corporal in 25 Regt & Elizabeth Callander residing in Glasgow married 5 Feb by Dr. Wm Taylor one of the Ministers of Glasgow.

So Joseph was now married and a corporal, to boot. The regiment spent some time in the barracks at Weedon Bec, where Elizabeth gave birth to their first son William in 1817, baptized the 26th of January. So now Joseph was a husband, a Corporal, and a father.

The regiment was primarily garrisoned in Ireland, where the next two children were born: John in 1819, and Robert in 1822. We have no records of those births. There may also have been a girl named Jemima born in this period; we only know that a child by that name, whose father was named Joseph, died in Linlithgow in 1824.

On October 3rd, 1826, Joseph was discharged from the army on account of “Varicose Veins + Worn out (illegible)”. Many soldiers were described as being worn out, and the British Army was rapidly shrinking in these peaceful years, along with its budget.

Making Shoes in Linlithgow

In July 1829, Joseph and Elizabeth, now back in Linlithgow, had a daughter named Margaret. She was baptized July 29th, 1829.

Joseph Greenock shoemaker and Elizabeth Callendar had a Daughter born July and baptized the 29th named Margaret.

It is interesting that after 18 years in the military, Joseph picked back up as a shoemaker. He couldn't have had much experience at 18, and then there's an 18 year gap, and then he's back to making shoes. He eventually became a journeyman (no longer an apprentice, but not a master), but it's not clear when.

Sometime around 1831, Joseph and Elizabeth had their last child that I know of when Ann was born. We don’t have a birth record, but Ann shows up in the 1841 census, in which Joseph and Elizabeth are still living in Linlithgow, on Lion Well Wynd.

A “wynd” is a narrow street or alleyway, a turning off the main street.

By this time son John had married Rebecca Durie, old comrade John Durie’s daughter, and Robert was living with them in Glasgow. I don’t know what happened to William, who would have been 24 and therefore possibly married by this time, or Margaret, who was only 12. My best guess is that she was living with a young couple named John and Margaret Craig, in Ayrshire.

In the 1851 census, Joseph and Elizabeth were living at 28 High Street, Linlithgow.

Margaret was now back at home, along with her two-year-old daughter Elizabeth Nicol. The father Alexander Nicol was not in the picture, but must have died around this time because Margaret remarried in 1856. Margaret was a “printfield worker”, a worker in a textile factory producing printed cloth. Ann was still at home, and interestingly is recorded as having been born in Glasgow, so perhaps the family had spent some time there around 1831.

For Joseph and Elizabeth, there’s not much to go on after the 1851 census. There is good reason to believe that they were alive in 1856, since they would otherwise have been noted as “deceased” on the registration of their daughter Margaret’s marriage to Andrew Jameson. They were both certainly dead by 1872, as indicated on son Robert’s death registration. There’s no sign of Joseph or Elizabeth in the 1861 census, so they most likely died some time between 1856 and 1861. I have yet to find a death registration for either of them, so they just fade away.