CHRIS McEWAN is a Labour councillor who holds the economy and regeneration portfolio on Darlington council cabinet. But who does he think he is?

For the past seven years, he and his mother, Anne Smith, of Redcar, have been trying to find out.

They’ve been chasing a ghost of a family rumour about a lost will and a sister who disappeared to the States. On their journey, they’ve found a bigamist, someone consigned to an asylum, plenty of unanswered questions and what may turn out to be a whole new family in America.

“It started with a great aunt’s story about a will in the 1920s and a lawyer called Balfour from Londonderry putting a notice in a newspaper seeking relatives,” said Chris.

“It seemed to revolve around my great-great-grandmother, Susan Motherwell, who was born in Ireland in 1841. She and her sister, Mary, were brought up by bachelor uncles in Donegal. When they reached a certain age, the uncles gave them some money and kicked them out. Mary went to America and became lost; Susan got married in 1857 when she was 16, to Samuel Watson, a spade finisher, and settled in Greenock, in Scotland.”

So investigations began in the village of Kildrum in Donegal where, it turned out, the Motherwells had been fairly wealthy Protestant plantation settlers.

“Driving around, it seemed as if they’d once owned everything in view, but now there are no traces of the Motherwells,” says Chris.

But it looks like Susan’s father was the James Motherwell who died of ship fever in Philadelphia in 1847, when she would have been six.

This seems to have left her an orphan to be brought up by her uncles, who were probably William and Thomas Motherwell. According to Taughboyne church records, in Donegal, they each owned a couple of hundred acres when they died unmarried in 1918 and 1919 – possibly the source of the 1920s will story.

THEN the investigation switched to Greenock, where it was discovered that Susan had had nine children – suddenly an enormous family opened up before Chris and Anne.

But there were skeletons in the closet. Susan’s eldest son went to Canada and, apparently to avoid a charge of bigamy, changed his name.

Her second son was James, although he seemed to have been airbrushed from the family history.

“This was my great-grandmother’s brother and yet no one had ever heard of him,” says Chris.

It soon became clear why: aged 23, he was incarcerated in an asylum.

“Amazingly,” says Chris, “within three days of ringing Glasgow health board, we had photocopies of his committal papers from 1888.”

They make sad, even upsetting, reading. James was described as “weak-minded from birth”.

A Dr John Macdonald wrote: “He has a dull, stupid look and speaks indistinctly. He does not know the day of the week, nor the name of the best-known places in the neighbourhood.

“Lieutenant Eadie states that he was found wandering the streets followed by crowds of people who were struck with his strange appearance and behaviour.”

And so the unfortunate fellow was locked up until he died in 1921, aged 63. This Victorian attitude, of both society and family, saddened and shocked Chris and Anne.

With the Scottish story coming together, attention switched to the search for Margaret, the sister lost in America. They trawled genealogy sites trying to find a match. Suddenly, earlier this summer, a family tree compiled by Margaret Parker, of Michigan, slotted into place – she was the great-great-granddaughter of a Mary Motherwell, who had emigrated from Donegal in the late 1850s.

“I went on Facebook and got a message back almost immediately,” says Chris. “It felt absolutely great,” says Anne, excitedly.

Chris, though, is not quite so carried away.

“We’re going through the family histories, confirming the links, but it does look likely that after five generations, we’ve made contact again, and proved there was some truth in the old story passed down the generations.

“It is exciting – but I don’t think we’ll ever get anything from that will.”

THE Motherwells are Anne’s mother’s line.

Her father was a Marshall, and here the tree goes back at least ten generations to Wolsingham, where they family were clockmakers. In fact, for the best part of two centuries, from the Upper Town part of the village, the Marshalls made fine, long case clocks that are now valuable antiques. Clockmaking seems to have wound up in Wolsingham when William Marshall, Chris’ great-great-great-greatgreat- grandfather, decided not to follow in his father’s clocksteps.

Instead, he became an apprentice shipwright on the North Shore of the Tyne.

The family still has his indenture, dated “the 59th year of the reign of George III” – 1819. It stipulates that the 14-year-old must behave himself: “Taverns, inns or alehouses, he shall not haunt; at cards, dice, tables or any other unlawful game, he shall not play,” it says.

This new line of engineering suited the Marshalls because the family’s other heirloom was presented to William’s son – another William – when he retired in 1916 after 50 years of faithful service building steam engines with J&G Joicey, of Newcastle.

Appropriately for a family famed as horologists, it is a pocket watch.

  • CHRIS is keen to hear from anyone researching Marshalls from Wolsingham or Witton-le-Wear.

Please email him: chrismcewan1@ btinternet.com