p. 48


JANE PATERSON OR DUNLOP (continued)


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map showing Cumbernauld
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Nothing more is known of Jane and Gavin until the birth of their first child, George, on 28 May 1859.  George was born at Dullator Lodge, Cumbernauld, Dunbartonshire.  Gavin Paterson's occupation was given as ploughman.  When he registered the birth of his son he made his mark, and did not sign the register.  It is not known why Gavin should have signed the register when he married, but made his mark when he registered the birth of his son six months later.

Cumbermauld is situated about 12 miles from the centre of Glasgow, and possibly around 8 miles from the Frankfield farm that Alexander, Jane's father, knew as a child.  (The farm is thought to have been somewhere around Stepps or Chryston, both of which can be seen on the zoom image of the map above.)  Obviously Gavin Paterson was still working with horses, and Dullator Lodge sounds rather like the lodge house of a large estate, but we have no further information about Jane and Gavin's life in Cumbernauld.  Dullator, it might be added, is a small village in the vicinity of Cumbernauld, and the name is derived from the Gaelic, meaning Dark Hill Slope.


Dunedin
Dunedin Court and Gaol (Otago Witness, 7 May 1864)
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The couple's second child, Alexander, was born on 15 September 1860, in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand.  It is not known what prompted the Patersons to emigrate.  It is known, however, that Otago was first settled only twelve years earlier, in 1848, by a group of pioneers from the Free Church of Scotland.  Perhaps Otago was, therfore, an unsurprising choice for the Patersons.  The original settlers intended to found a colony along the principles of the Pilgrim Fathers, but the scheme failed financially, and the colony was then flung open to all who were willing to invest their money and/or energy in it.  Mark Twain, writing on Dunedin in More Tramps Abroad (1897), noted that:
The people are Scotch.  They stopped here on their way from home to heaven --thinking they had arrived

Hopefully, that was the way that the Patersons felt when they arrived.


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