Jane Young (b.1856) & James Henry Milne (b. 1856)

My great grandparents; mum's paternal grandparents.

At a very busy time last year I posted a really poor photograph of two gold lockets which were some of the family possessions I was in the midst of sorting. The lockets belonged to my mum's side of the family and my sister and I thought they should be offered to our uncle, the last of his generation in the family. He was intrigued as he couldn’t remember them in use but he gladly accepted and finally we managed to hand them on.

Our uncle then very kindly decided to have them valued, cleaned,  restored and fitted with suitable chains so that we could have one each. Today he brought them over from Edinburgh. The locket for my sister didn’t have family photographs inside so the jeweller fitted two small photos of mum and dad on their wedding day. The one given to me has these photographs of my great-grandparents, my maternal grandfather’s parents.

James and Jane were Leithers, though in the 1901 census James’s birthplace is recorded as ‘England’ (It was Gateshead). They married in Edinburgh in 1880 and had six children, of whom five reached adulthood.  My grandfather, born in 1899,  was the youngest. In 1901 the family lived at 100 Montgomery Street. Jane gave her craggy looks to some of the following generations and her name to a number of her female descendants. James died in 1910 and Jane some years later.

Such a beautiful family treasure made all the more special by the photographs