My sister gave me on a family history lesson this week via Google Earth. It’s history I did not know.

The photo above shows what remains of Fergushill Rows in East Ayrshire, Scotland, near the town of Kilmarnock. The stone building, now a barn, was one of a series of buildings where coal miners and their families lived in the late 19th century. My grandmother (my dad’s mother) was born in 1885, and lived in a similar building (Front Row) until she was 12. It was located just next door, in the field visible in the background.

Here are Bonnie’s instructions.

Find North Fergushill Farm. It will come up on a Google Search.
Zoom in and put this at the center bottom of your screen.

Directly above (north?) this small complex is a much larger working farm. Go to Street View and move down until you get to the brick building with six boarded up windows. This is the last remnant of the miners rows.

Continue down to the next intersection. The rows were in what is now an open field with a few trees. Our grandmother lived in Front Row.

As you can see, this small building was divided into six apartments, each housing a family. The rooms appear to be about 9 feet by 12 feet, at least not very much larger than that.

Here’s a description in Wikipedia.

In 1874 Dobie records that a miner’s village called Fergushill existed with a population of 531. Groome refers to the colliers village as having been established in around 1835.

Fergushill miners’ village, was owned by Messrs. Finnie & Son. It was composed of 7 rows of cottages. There were ten thatched cottages.

It turns out I was wrong about the size of the apartments. They were actually substantially smaller. Front Row, where my grandmother’s family lived, is described in an area history, as follows:

There are fifteen double apartment houses in this row, three of which were empty when we visited it on 12th November, 1913. There are 63 persons here, with similar closet accommodation, no coalhouses, no washing-houses. The houses are of brick, and the room hardly larger than a press, 9 feet by 6 feet 3 inches. We found thirteen persons in one house.

Bonnie comments:

Our grandmother was hopelessly ashamed of how she grew up, and would never talk about her life there. She did talk once about going to visit her Uncle Hugh Montgomery and his family who lived at Bensley Square, another set of miners’ rows. She said they used to go on Wednesday evenings for prayers and hymn singing. We have photographs of the children at Fergushill School — the boys in one, the girls in the other. Our grandmother was about 8 at the time.

You can read more of Bonnie’s comments about our grandmother on her occasional blog.

I knew my grandmother grew up poor, but I didn’t realize conditions were this bad. And I didn’t know her father was a coal miner.

The Wikipedia article cited above includes another item–this photo of my grandmother with her family. They must have still been living at Fergushill when this was taken. The photo is from the collection of a “cousin” in Scotland (I’m not going to try to figure out what degree of cousin).

I’m still digesting all of this.